The DOJ had raised the possibility that the formations, centered on internalized racism and made public by a former candidate for the Seattle city council, Chris Rufo, violated the law on civil rights.

In the wake of the thinly veiled threat, the Civil Rights Bureau needed the support of staff from the city’s prosecutor’s office.

“It was a serious exercise for the [City Attorney’s Office] to try to understand what the job of the Race and Social Justice Initiative is and how they can better protect the city, ”said Tamar Zere, responsible for the initiative. “And I feel like it was a really thoughtful and measured attempt to see what they could do to help us and protect the city.”

After 12 years, there will soon be a new city attorney. Incumbent Pete Holmes failed to pass the primary, setting up a race between two clearly different candidates, Ann Davison and Nicole Thomas-Kennedy.

Much of the city’s race for prosecutors to date has focused on the bureau’s approach to criminal offenses – how and when each candidate would or would not prosecute them.

But the office also plays a bigger role, which is to represent the city and its employees in civil litigation – defend against outside lawsuits and attack those who are perceived to have harmed the city. The proposed 2022 budget for the Civil Division is $ 16.7 million, compared to $ 9.4 million for the Criminal Division.

Here too, the candidates have very divergent philosophies on the role of the office. For Thomas-Kennedy, it is as a city hall partner – an opportunity for creative solutions in pursuit of progressive city council goals. Despite all her criticism of Holmes’ criminal prosecutors, she said her civil division had worked well and that she had yet to meet a lawyer there that she would want to fire if elected. In fact, Thomas-Kennedy said she would expand the civil division, perhaps to the detriment of the criminal division.

Davison, who ran for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket in 2020 and whose politics lean much more centrist than Seattle City Council, largely avoids discussing a specific strategy towards civil litigation , presenting him rather as a sort of arbiter. She would fulfill the city’s legal obligation to provide sound legal advice, she said, while not allowing her own political preference to seep into this sphere.

Each candidate presents the other’s approach as imperfect.

“It’s the old ‘bullets and kicks, I’m right here as a referee, I call him what I see,” “Thomas-Kennedy said of Davison’s approach. But nothing is ever as easy as a lawyer, she said. “This is an elected position. The city attorney directs all civil litigation for the city. It is not a sitting position and taking orders.

Davison, meanwhile, said if Thomas-Kennedy wanted more of a helping hand in politics, she shouldn’t have run for the city attorney.

“If they’re curious, they can ask me what my personal position is, but the legal opinion is quite different,” Davison said. “And so for the voters, I think it’s important to listen to my opponent, who clearly has a political bent and perhaps should have run for city council.”

Work in progress

Whoever is elected will inherit nearly 20 major ongoing civil cases. These include the lawsuits brought by Holmes against Monsanto for its alleged role in the pollution of the Duwamish River and Purdue Pharma for its alleged role in the opioid epidemic. In most cases, the city attorney’s office defends the city – against lawsuits by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce over the city’s new payroll tax; from the family of Charleena Lyles for her death at the hands of the Seattle police; Instacart on the city’s compulsory premium for food deliverers; landlords on the moratorium on evictions; from the Seattle Times on missing text messages from Mayor Jenny Durkan; and more.

Much of the division’s work, however, is aimed at preventing the city from going to court in the first place. It is here, say city employees, that the role of the city attorney’s office lives in a gray area.

When Erika Pablo worked for the city, one of her jobs was to help develop the city’s Fair Housing Law, which prohibits landlords from denying housing to people with a criminal background. Essentially, the city was trying to create a new protected class of people.

Pablo said she would like the only role of lawyers to be to provide a cold risk assessment. But in the case of this legislation, which was new to any city in the country, more was needed. “There was no case law on anything like this,” said Pablo, who now works for King County and is a lawyer herself. “So the legal risks were pretty broad that we were facing. The law firm that we were working with, if they didn’t share these values ​​and goals that we shared, they wouldn’t be able to litigate.

It’s a familiar refrain in a city that likes to push the boundaries of legislation, sometimes into uncharted territory. And it’s one that many city workers have grown accustomed to, as Holmes’ office has evolved over the past 12 years.

“We can’t get very far unless we test the limits of these laws,” Zere of the Civil Rights Bureau said. “So I guess what I’m hoping for is courage and a real desire to build on those values ​​that we believe are part of our institution and of Seattle. “

“Just legal advice”

But for Davison, the city attorney’s office has gone too far in terms of policy advice.

“I think what has to happen is [the City Attorney’s Office] must be restored to a place of fair legal advice to those elected to create policy, ”she said in an interview last summer. “I don’t think it’s going like that now.”

Holmes declined to comment for this story.

Davison promises that she will be able to separate her political preferences from her role as city attorney. It’s a commitment that, if elected, would quickly be tested in the context of the city’s new payroll tax, which the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce sued last year to repeal. The case was dismissed, but the House appealed, and the case is still before the courts.

During her previous campaigns for Seattle City Council in 2019 and as a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in 2020, Davison issued a skeptical note about the new spending and taxes. His current campaign is supported by donors who resist the new taxes in general and the Seattle payroll tax in particular.

One of them is Steve Gordon, whose Concerned Taxpayer Accountability Center spent nearly $ 10,000 on Davison’s behalf and an additional $ 10,000 against Holmes before the primary. Gordon is also behind Concerned Taxpayers of Washington, a political action committee that began in 2018 in part in reaction to Seattle’s first attempt to impose a tax on large businesses.

Gordon, who owns commercial truck dealerships in the area, said support for Davison was more about a perception of anarchy in the city and not how she would run the city’s civilian division. But he added that he was tired of what he called “anti-business sentiment” in Seattle.

“I think there is a concern, especially with the business community, who want to ensure that the taxes they pay are used to support successful businesses and that they are not continually imposed in a position uncompetitive, ”he said of Seattle politics in general.

Additionally, a new political action committee formed on Davison’s behalf shares some donors with the 2018 effort to repeal Seattle’s first business tax through a referendum. It includes several big names in development and real estate, such as Richard Hedreen and Martin Smith. Thomas-Kennedy called donors the “who’s who of people who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes” and who won’t have to if Davison is elected.

But Davison again rejected the importance of his own political bent.

“It has nothing to do with what I think of politics and the purpose of what they want to do,” she said. “This is all that is permitted under current laws.”

Defense of the cops

The city’s district attorney’s office is also tasked with defending police officers against civil litigation – a task that Thomas-Kennedy could see at odds with his abolitionist stance and his tweets denigrating the police.

Prior to 2011, the city outsourced much of this civilian work to a private law firm, but Holmes brought more home with the aim of reducing costs and improving results. Police unions fought the arrangement, creating friction, said Brian Maxey, former deputy city attorney under Holmes and former director of operations for the Seattle Police Department.

“Pete has always had issues with the police department, certainly friction with officers,” Maxey said. “But we had a very clear understanding that we were going to represent these officers.”

However, given Thomas-Kennedy’s stances on the police, he said he believed she should outsource this work again. “I think she should do it, ethically,” he said. “I think the officers would file a grievance fairly quickly. “

Thomas-Kennedy took issue with the idea that she would need to ship the work out of the office. She said she spoke to Jessica Nadelman, the current head of the civilian division, and told her of her confidence in the office’s ability to defend the police if elected. By keeping the work in-house, Thomas-Kennedy believes the process can move faster and more transparently.

“I think people deserve a fair process,” she said. “I was a public defender. I didn’t like a lot of things my clients were accused of. That doesn’t mean I won’t stand up for them.

Zere of the Civil Rights Office expects a difficult transition no matter who is elected. It is a top-down problem of municipal government; Seattle will soon have its fourth elected mayor in 10 years. “We are constantly starting over,” she said.

The DOJ’s threat to the Seattle Civil Rights Office faded under a new presidency. But whoever is elected city prosecutor will hold office until at least 2025, a year after the next presidential election. So while no civil lawsuits have yet been filed against the city’s race and social justice formations, “that doesn’t mean we don’t expect them to happen someday, on the basis of current trends that we are seeing, ”said Nona Raybern, communications advisor. in the office. “And if there is ever a serious legal threat to the race and social justice work taking place in the city, we count on a city lawyer who understands these principles and values ​​and can support this work that we are doing to move forward. “