A looming boondoggle at Harborview
Plus civil rights vs. the HOA and some more campaign cash news
When things go wrong in government, especially in public infrastructure projects, elected officials often try to save face with tight smiles and platitudes worthy of a halftime speech when a team is getting its butt kicked. So a King County Council1 meeting last month on a potential boondoggle brewing on a mega-construction project at Harborview Medical Center was refreshing.
The mess involves the second massive set of cost-overruns for a huge expansion at Harborview, thanks to the largess of King County taxpayers via a 2020 countywide vote on a $1.74B bond. By the county’s math, that project may now cost at least $2.2B, but they’re still in negotiations with their general contractor, so who knows? Deadlines were continuing to blow by. So things got spicy at the meeting, raising the question of what, if anything, would actually get built.
“How do we start this project if we know we don’t have the resources to build it?” asked Councilmember Rod Dembowski.
“The costs are just escalating beyond control,” said Councilmember Claudia Balducci. “It’s extraordinarily frustrating.”
Why you should care about this: Harborview, the premier safety net hospital in the region and the only level one trauma center in four states, has a special place in the civic heart of King County. But it’s aging, overcrowded and has ongoing financial problems. The bond was supposed to address all three (the hospital is owned by King County and run by UW Medicine). And big picture, the Harborview mess reaffirms growing skepticism about government’s ability to do big things.
The original plan pitched to voters deep into the pandemic was a new 10-story tower, a new behavioral health building, 150 respite beds in the adjacent Harborview Hall, a fixed-up Pioneer Square clinic and a host of upgrades. With King County Executive Dow Constantine as a lead cheerleader, voters showered it with a 76% yes margin in 2020.
And then things started going sideways. The construction delays and massive cost run-ups in the pandemic and beyond certainly didn’t help, but Constantine’s team apparently picked the wrong design-builder as well as the wrong owner’s rep. They were both replaced within the last year. It’s the second builder that is now locked in negotiations with the new division of King County government spun up specifically to do the project.
The financing was already in trouble by 2023, when new cost estimates showed the $1.74.B plan had ballooned to nearly $2.7B. Even in government work, missing the mark by $900M within three years is a whopper. That led to a work group skinnying the whole project down: 3 of those 10 new floors would be built but not finished, and the behavioral health facility and those Harborview Hall beds were scrapped. That got the estimate back down to the original bond amount, sort of. And deadlines were reset, aiming for a December 2028 move-in date. Not great, and definitely a candidate for the Observer’s unofficial Outrages in Public Projects (sounds like “ooops!”) scale, although not on the scale of Sound Transit’s screw-Ballard plan.
And then the deadlines started getting so thoroughly blown as to make them laughable. The first patient admitted won’t be until May 2032, more than 11 years after voters turned the spigot on. The project doesn’t yet have a master use permit from the city of Seattle.
So council members at last month’s come-to-Jesus meeting had reason to be incredulous. Councilmembers said they’ve not gotten regular updates, so there was some headscratching about one of the new budget bombs that had suddenly spiked – a $160M parking garage. But Councilmember Stephanie Fain said the need for more parking shouldn’t have been a surprise at all because it was flagged during that 2023 “rescoping” plan. She should know: she was chair of Harborview’s board at the time.
So what happens now? County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s team told the council he was committed to delivering the project.2 He’s gotten credit for regularly meeting with Harborview about the project3, which says something about Constantine’s approach. But getting that done may mean cutting back the scope of what was sold to voters back in 2020 for a second time; or magicking some more money. That magic will likely involve a whole second pot of public money, a property tax for Harborview operations that is councilmatic (aka it didn’t get a public vote) thanks to 2024 legislation from Olympia, HB 2348. How much of those operations dollars get diverted to actually building the Harborview tower is tbd, and the council could hike up the tax, or bond against it. Either way, “Time is money, and we’re not moving fast,” said Balducci.
JM
A neighbor war goes to court
The world had just entered COVID when Joseph Mitchell moved into his townhome in Lacey. Not long afterwards, the complaints started rolling in from his new neighbors.
At first, they accused him of blasting his music too loudly. Then it was his weightlifting that was bothering people around the cul-de-sac. Mitchell’s neighbors took their gripes to their local homeowners association which saddled him with a $50 fine. They also threatened to call the cops. He chalked it up as more than just bullying the new guy on the block: This was because he was Black.
Flash forward to 2024. Allegations by the state Human Rights Commission dug up little to suggest Mitchell had done anything wrong. His neighbors had no recordings to prove otherwise. Moreover, said notices omitted his rights to appeal per the HOA’s rules. No one offered him a hearing or a formal investigation either.
Compare that to the cat Mitchell caught on video digging up his yard circa 2021. It earned its owner a violation notice in light of the neighborhood’s rule against roaming pets. Yet the HOA opted to rescind that notice without further action once the four-legged fiend was removed — a privilege not afforded to Mitchell.
Mitchell made it crystal clear in his email to Summerwalk Homeowners Association about what he believed was going on:
“This is simply another case of racist, white people using the system to harass law abiding, innocent black people like me who are simply trying to live our lives in peace. I have had enough of this.”
The Human Rights Commission argued as much in its lawsuit against Summerwalk and J&M Management LLC, which got its day in the state Court of Appeals. The Tuesday hearing saw Judges Rich Melnick and Bradley Maxa lend a lot of credence to the idea Summerwalk mishandled the situation. Whether it paved over Mitchell’s civil rights is TBD.
TG
More campaign cash news
Big money’s starting to fly around to campaigns for ballot initiatives and hot candidate races. Here’s a look at some notable checks in recent weeks.
The National Education Association sent $250,000 to No Hate In Washington State, the committee opposing the two ballot measures already headed for the fall ballot. The national educators’ union joins its state affiliate, the Washington Education Association, which is in for more than $100K; the ACLU of Washington at $100K; and SEIU 775 Ballot Fund at $50K.
Both of the initiatives in question come from conservative ballot measure machine Let’s Go Washington. Initiative IL26-001 would roll back changes made by the Legislature last year to the Parents Bill of Rights, which was itself an LGW initiative to the Legislature.4 IL26-638 would bar trans athletes from girls’ high school sports.
No Hate In Washington State has raised more than $1 million overall, which isn’t enough to run a statewide campaign of any consequence. Both measures are presumed to be broadly popular with voters, although we haven’t seen polling. Let’s Go Washington has raised a similar amount of money, but its spending is focused on its ongoing attempt to force a vote to repeal the state’s new income tax on its highest earners.
The WEA also wrote a $50K check to Millionaire’s Tax Washington, the thus-far small campaign against the income tax repeal. Another $50K came from the SEIU Initiative Fund. The committee has now raised more than $150K. As we noted in Monday’s edition, that’s not near enough should the repeal initiative make it to the ballot.
And here’s some real inside baseball
Rep. Cyndy Ryu, D-Shoreline, sent $70K in “surplus” campaign money to the Snohomish County Democratic Party, a curious development given that she’s challenging fellow Democrat Jesse Salomon for his Senate seat in the deep blue 32nd Legislative District. The district includes parts of King and Snohomish counties. While the county party could theoretically spend the money some other way, that kind of contribution is usually a campaign-finance bank shot, in which the party basically gives the money right back, usually in the form of a party-sponsored campaign mailer.
That would save Ryu the trouble of asking individual donors to transfer their cash to the new campaign. In this case, that might be dicey because many donors might want to steer clear of backing her over a sitting incumbent of the same party. Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, who isn’t happy about this intraparty throwdown, warned the check-writers in the lobby not to allow their money to be transferred.
PQ
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A tired trail dog
Arya takes a nap in the sun during a recent backpacking trip with the Woman Who Lets Us Live With Her. Want to see your pet in this space? Drop us a photo and some caption material.
Yes, we know it’s technically the Metropolitan King County Council, but no one calls it that. Metropolitan also recalls the Meowtropolitan Cat Cafe just down the street from Jonathan, which conjured up the funny image of council members trying to herd cats in the executive office.
To be fair to him, this boondoggle was on Constantine’s watch, although Zahilay was on the council as it unfolded.
Zahilay inheriting this mess from Constantine recalled “Parable of the bowls of shit” scene in The Wire where a new mayor gets the lowdown on the realpolitik of governing.
In 2024, Democratic leaders in the Legislature allowed a vote on the Parents’ Bill of Rights and two other initiatives to in part to keep popular conservative ideas off the ballot, but also to preserve the right to amend it the following year, which is exactly what they did. Former Observer education reporter Sara Kassabian went deep on those changes.