A unanimous vote among the three members of the Seattle City Council’s Housing, Arts and Civil Rights Committee forwarded a proposal to the full council that would amend sections of the Seattle Municipal Code to “recognize genders outside the gender binary, recognize pansexuality and asexuality as orientations, and include consensual relationships with multiple partners as an element of attitudes, preferences, and practices pertaining to sexual orientation.”

The protections would apply to employment, housing, business licensure, places of public accommodation, park usage, and “bias-free policing,” according to the proposal.

Seattle would follow Portland, West Hollywood, Berkeley, California, and a handful of other cities in adopting the expanded protections against discrimination. Under the bill, residents facing unfair treatment could file complaints and seek remedy through Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights.

The discount grocery chain has submitted several permit filings over the last few weeks indicating renewed efforts to open a store at 13550 Aurora Ave. N. in North Seattle, the site of a former Sam’s Club location left vacant since 2018. Recently filed construction permits show plans for major interior renovation and a reduction in the building’s square footage.

A WinCo spokesperson told the Puget Sound Business Journal that it plans to open the store within a year. “We’ve put out the word, seen what people think and we’ve done it many times in (the Seattle area),” the spokesperson told the publication. “The shoppers there seem to be really hungry for WinCo and we’re really hungry to give it to them.”

That’s a relief for some who thought WinCo might abandon efforts after legal setbacks earlier this year, when a hearing examiner overturned the city’s determination that the project would have no significant environmental impacts.

The decision came in response to an appeal by Lake Washington Working Families, a group who argued that the neighborhood would be harmed by the WinCo.

Lake Washington Working Families claims to be “a coalition of King County residents, working families, environmental advocates, labor unions, and local merchants united in opposition to unchecked urban sprawl and overdevelopment.” But it has no website, is not registered with the state and has only made public appearances to challenge two WinCos, leading to much online speculation about who exactly is behind the group.

It took 85 days to reach the conclusion of the longest hotel strike in state history. The majority of the hotel’s roughly 115 workers at 255 S. King St. had been picketing since June 18, the height of the FIFA Men’s World Cup.

The contract with Hilton entails an agreement on year-round healthcare coverage, additional workload protections and improved rights for immigrant workers, per the union’s news release Friday.

And as of Jan. 1, the hotel’s housekeepers will be the highest-paid union housekeepers in Washington, Unite Here! said. The starting pay will rise to $31.03 per hour.

Doctor Doom took the podium at a Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday to thank the council for covering the city in surveillance cameras. “Doom took over Axon enterprises [...] and now Doom will be watching you. Your continued cooperation expanding Doom’s surveillance network is required,” the Marvel supervillain said.

“This is the first of Doom’s gifts to the city of Seattle. The second gift is this: Doom will expand the real-time crime center to all neighborhoods with over 1,000 cameras watching every move,” Doom said. “Doom has total dominion over the city of Seattle. Doom will be behind the cameras watching those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Doom will be able to find your immigrant neighbors and Doom will be able to ensure the safety of the women of Seattle alongside officers that stalk their exes.”

The boy’s journey from an encampment littered with rat droppings and urine bottles to a classroom began in October 2025, when Moreland and her team first visited the tent where he was alone. His mother was struggling with fentanyl addiction and being sexually exploited. His father refused offers of housing, food, and services.

Neighbors had called the Seattle Police Department and Child Protective Services repeatedly. Each time, authorities determined the boy was not in imminent danger.

“Everybody kept saying the same thing: He is OK. He is safe,” Moreland said. “We continued to show up at that tent, knowing that that was not the case.”

In December 2025, KIRO Newsradio reported on the boy’s situation, drawing widespread public attention to the case. Moreland was recorded offering the family immediate shelter — a private room available that day. The father turned her down.

“Not from you,” he told her.

But neighbors kept watching. Moreland’s team kept showing up. And in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2026, a Seattle police officer called Moreland to say the mother and boy were ready to accept help.

The mother entered care for active fentanyl addiction. The More We Love connected her with recovery services and arranged behavioral health treatment for the boy through Seattle Children’s Hospital. Moreland said the organization partnered with another mission for long-term housing, but that agency was unable to handle the boy’s behavioral challenges and released the family back to the streets.

“We said, not a chance,” Moreland said. “Our case managers have dug in day after day, helping this little man get through this.”

The mother remains in recovery, Moreland said, calling it “a big deal” while acknowledging the difficulty of learning to parent while breaking a generational cycle of trauma and addiction.

“She has been in the cycle predominantly her whole life,” Moreland said. “We really have to work on her traumas as well.”

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The More We Love recently received a $500,000 matching donation from an anonymous donor to fund rescue efforts for women and children in encampments. Every dollar donated to the organization through its website, themorewelove.org, will be matched, Moreland said.

Wilson’s administration says the “Seawall” plan is to overhaul city permitting, deploy public assets for local business growth, and assemble a new economic task force as Seattle grapples with high living costs and heavy reliance on corporate giants.

“Businesses should be able to start here, grow here, and succeed here, and their employees should be able to build a life in the city where they work,” Wilson said in the announcement. “This assessment gives us an honest picture of where we are, and this Executive Order is how we start doing something about it. We are bringing Seattle’s business community in as genuine partners, and taking real steps to retain our strong foundation, diversify and grow our economic base, and make it simpler to do business in this city.”

Data released in the mayor’s announcement showed that companies with 100 or more workers drove 74.5% of Seattle’s net job growth between 2014 and 2023, well above the national rate of 68.5%. Mid-sized employers generated only 16.6% of local job growth, falling behind the national average of 22.7% and trailing cities like San Diego at 32.9%, Austin at 28.5%, Minneapolis at 28.4%, Portland at 25.5%, Boston at 23.7%, and Denver at 23.1%. Small businesses produced just 8.9% of local job gains.

The figures also showed that a Seattle couple with two young children needs 91.5% more income than a childless couple to cover basic household expenses. That family cost gap exceeds every peer city outside the Bay Area, outstripping Denver at 84.5%, Boston at 77.4%, Portland at 70.1%, Austin at 70%, and Atlanta at 50.2%.

King County Superior Court Judge Cindi Port found that Alan Tagle and his company violated Washington employment laws, including by failing to pay minimum wage for all hours worked, according to findings of fact and conclusions of law signed Aug. 28.

The damages total about $1.85 million, according to calculations by the groups representing the employees, the Fair Work Center and Schroeter Goldmark & Bender. The groups said the figure includes damages for wage claims, which the judge ordered doubled, along with damages for other claims and prejudgment interest.

Liz Diamond, a spokesperson for Schroeter Goldmark & Bender, said Tagle operated five bikini barista stands in the Puget Sound area, most under the name “Beehive Espresso.”

Public records indicate Tagle has owned at least two companies with registered addresses associated with espresso stands in Bothell and Edmonds.

The ruling followed a 17-day trial between March and May, during which the court heard testimony from 18 current and former employees, Tagle and two expert witnesses.

The lawsuit alleged Tagle failed to issue paychecks or paystubs for several years and failed to adequately track employees' hours and payroll. Diamond said Tagle instead “instructed them to take their wages and tips from the till.”

“Because baristas work most shifts alone, we do not always know whether what is happening to us is happening to coworkers,” said Eilish Hoffman, a former Beehive Espresso employee, named plaintiff and class representative.

“As a result, breaking through that isolation and building trust was one of the first big barriers we had to overcome in order to join together for what we were rightfully owed,” Hoffman continued, adding that social media ultimately provided a way for employees to communicate with one another.

Niki Seligman, a spokesperson for the Fair Work Center, said the “confusing pay practices” made it “difficult for individual baristas to challenge what was happening.”

KING 5 was not able to reach Tagle through phone numbers associated with him or his businesses.

An investigation into complaints against the director of Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights (SOCR), Derrick Wheeler-Smith, found that Wheeler-Smith sexually harassed a male employee by accompanying him to a strip club during a city-sponsored trip to historic civil rights sites in Alabama in 2023.

The investigation was prompted by a memo from PROTEC17, the union that represents many SOCR employees, containing allegations that Wheeler-Smith and his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, had engaged in discrimination, harassment, and intimidation against civil rights office staff.

“The investigation included a review of OCR employees’ allegations that Wheeler-Smith and/or Mohamed engaged in unwelcome conduct or comments based on religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity” the investigation report says. “However, even assuming all the information provided during the investigation was true, those allegations did not rise to the level of conduct protected by” the city’s rule against discrimination and workplace harassment.

The investigation, which wrapped up in June, found that Wheeler-Smith sexually harassed his male employee, who was also a longtime personal friend, “by taking [the employee] to a strip club on a work trip.” The employee told investigators he didn’t feel he could say no to going to the strip club, given that Wheeler-Smith was his boss. Wheeler-Smith said he only went to the strip club because the employee said he wouldn’t go without him.

Investigators found that the misogynistic texts did not constitute sexual harassment because they were not “unwanted,” and that a change in the employee’s work assignment wasn’t retaliation for comments the employee made about trans women at a group training.

Nor, the investigators found, was it sexual harassment when Wheeler-Smith told a group of staffers a story about accidentally ending up a a swingers’ resort with his wife and being propositioned, or when he gave a toast at a work event that concluded, “May all your ups and downs be in bed,” which some staffers found offensive. (Wheeler-Smith told investigators that by “ups and downs in bed,” he meant getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night.)

Wheeler-Smith sent one of the memes we previously reported on—a fake image of Kamala Harris with bruised knees captioned, “CONGRATS to Kamala on her new promotion! I don’t know how you did it!”—with the message, “This innanet is undefeated.” According to the report, Wheeler-Smith told investigators the message was meant to “show his distaste for the vile and disrespectful meme,” but his employee said he took the comment to mean the meme was “spot on” and “accurate as hell.”

In another message, Wheeler-Smith sent an X thread by Kanye West that concluded, “WIVES SELL PUSSY FOR LIFE,” saying Kanye was “saying some wild shit but he got a point here.”

The texts Wheeler-Smith sent the employee also included a meme of a Black woman posting, “My throat hurt but my baby got uniform clothes,” and a screenshot that read, “12 years ago today. my friend Dave came out running and screaming ‘ITS A BOY!!!’ With tears streaming down his face…We never went back to Thailand again.”

According to the investigation, Wheeler-Smith said he exchanged texts with the employee, a longtime acquaintance, out of deference to an elder. “According to Wheeler-Smith, the Black community respected its elder members,” the investigators wrote. “[The employee] was a seventy-year-old Black man. As a result, [the employee] set the tone of their friendship.”

The messages, which do not include communications between SPD officials except where the mayor’s office was included, show two things. First, that the mayor’s office dithered and debated whether Wilson herself should go to the scene of the shooting for three hours before she finally went to Seattle Center, partly in response to TV reporters criticizing her for not being there.

And second, that the primary reason for the delay in information, as well as almost all of the delay in holding a press conference that night, was that SPD delayed the release of information repeatedly, withholding any new information information from the public and press until the press conference finally took place around 11pm.

SPD, the messages show, knew critical details about the shooting, including the fact that it was not a random mass shooting or terrorist event within an hour of the shooting—that is, before 7:30pm—but did not put any of that information out broadly until after 1:00 in the morning on July 27.

The messages include texts from mayoral communications staffer Jonah Spangenthal-Lee to SPD Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith asking her why SPD had not provided any information since a tweet warning the public of a shooting with “multiple shooting victims” at Seattle Center at 6:29pm. “Sarah, where is SPD”s statement?” Spangenthal-Lee wrote at 8:36. “It’s been two hours since you guys have posted anything? Even some tweets at this point…”

A few minutes later, Spangenthal-Lee told other mayoral staffers in an internal Teams chat, “It’s fucking embarrassing that SPD has waited HOURS to put anything out. … I’m just saying this is a massive fucking disaster and hit to public trust.”

CHS reported here in July as a judge denied a bid by a group of neighbors and nearby property owners to close the park over complaints of public nudity, sexual activity, and disorder.

In his decision, Judge Samuel Chung sided with the City of Seattle and Friends of Denny Blaine in keeping the two-acre park on the shores of Lake Washington open — and nude — calling Denny Blaine “a limited natural resource that must be shared by the residents of the neighborhood and the Park’s visitors.”

The decision came with caveats after several findings that the court said justified the neighbors’ claims around lewd acts and criminal activity at the park. In the ruling, the judge said the city must implement and manage a previously approved abatement plan, and “develop and implement a park specific user plan and code of conduct to address overcrowding, safety, and prohibited and acceptable behaviors.”

The new guideline review runs parallel to broader community sessions starting late September regarding long-term park investments and improvements.

An estimated 2,000 fish, mostly non-native species, have died near the bridge. Exact counts are difficult, in part because many have decomposed, transit staff said. Sound Transit for months has hailed its innovative engineering to control electric current over the lake, so news that fish are being killed comes as a letdown.

The Washington State Department of Transportation discovered the problem Aug. 3 and notified Sound Transit promptly, according to transit CEO Dow Constantine.

“We are still in the discovery mode. Fish biologists and engineers are now busy analyzing photos and video collected by the divers,” Constantine told a transit-board committee. “Early analysis has shown that the majority of fish are non-native or invasive perch and bass, with a small number of salmon identified.”

The dead fish were clustered near the ends of the bridge, where cables to control electric current rested on the lake bottom, Constantine said.

WSDOT Secretary Julie Meredith, speaking remotely at Thursday’s meeting, said officials are working to find the cause, and are coordinating with environmental agencies, as well as tribes that monitor fish runs.

“The bridge remains safe for the traveling public, and WSDOT and Sound Transit are going to continue to share the responsibility for guaranteeing that, both now and over the long term,” she said.

The light rail tracks, where train service began March 28, run next to the westbound lanes of I-90. The water closest to the trains — between the westbound Hadley bridge and the nearby eastbound bridge — is a maintenance zone where the public doesn’t boat, swim or kayak.

Regardless, transit staff say electric current next to floating bridges isn’t powerful enough to harm someone in the water. Scuba diving to visit old sunken I-90 pontoons is “relatively popular,” said WSDOT communications director Ryan Overton. The eastbound bridge, even without trains, also has cables where low-level current travels, “and they are not a health hazard,” he said.

"I knew the money would go to my school, and I was very blessed to go to a school that has a lot of money and resources 一 but also, not a lot of Black kids and not as many students of color," said Johnson. "I was thinking about my piece and why I did it all, and I just [realized]: 'I should give this to a school full of kids who look like me 一 a school full of Black kids.' And immediately, I thought of Rainier Beach."

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for the 2024–25 school year, about 41% of Rainier Beach High School students identified as Black, while about 8% were listed as two or more races. In 2011, the school was nearly closed, as just 366 students attended classes in a building with a capacity of nearly four times that.

The school has come a long way since then. More than 900 students were enrolled at Rainier Beach High School in the 2025–26 school year, and the school had a four-year graduation rate of 83.8% in 2024–25, according to data from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. On Aug. 28, the school held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the completion of its performing arts center.

After a quick Google search showed that Rainier Beach High School had the highest percentage of Black students among high schools in Seattle Public Schools, Johnson acted.

"I just came out and said I was going to do it. I also made it really public so that if my school went back on it, that would be a bad look on them," Johnson said.

Seattle’s César Chávez Park, which had its name removed in March after explosive allegations of sexual abuse surfaced against the late farm-labor activist, has a new name: Parque Libertad. Seattle Parks and Recreation approved the name for the space, which is located in the South Park neighborhood, according to a news release from the agency.

The park, which was formally dedicated in 2008, is owned by King County and managed by Seattle Parks. “Libertad (‘freedom’) is a universal value that reflects the enduring pursuit of civil rights, equality and opportunity for all,” Seattle Parks and Recreation Interim Superintendent Michele Finnegan said in a news release.

“Parque Libertad honors the many individuals and communities who have advanced justice throughout Seattle’s history while creating a welcoming, inclusive place that celebrates freedom, belonging and civic participation for future generations,” she added. The name Parque Libertad was chosen after members of the public submitted suggestions to the Parks Naming Committee, according to the news release.

In March, a New York Times investigation revealed allegations that Chávez — who died in 1993 — raped Dolores Huerta, the co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, and also sexually abused girls.

Over 70% of eligible MOHAI employees signed union authorization cards prior to Monday’s announcement, said Emily Turner, a K-12 and youth program coordinator who is part of the union’s organizing committee, in a phone call Tuesday. MOHAI Workers United hopes to form a “wall-to-wall” union to advocate for better working conditions for all employees, Turner said.

“We want more autonomy over our working conditions in our workplaces and to do things democratically,” Turner said.

MOHAI employees cited understaffing and high turnover, a lack of benefits — such as healthcare — for part-time and on-call workers, and low pay despite rising living costs in Seattle as some reasons for unionizing, Turner said. They are also seeking “changes in leadership practices, organizational culture and workplace policies” so that staff can feel comfortable speaking up about their concerns, according to a news release.

The 15-year-old arrested at the Bite of Seattle shooting will stay locked up in the county’s juvenile detention center, after being there for over a month.

Ultimately, Judge Veronica Galván decided that the teen should remain at the detention center because he is accused of firing a gun into a crowd of people, and remains “a threat to community safety.”

“It’s not a no, just not yet,” Galván told the teen’s father.

A representative for one of the injured victims spoke via video conference, saying they objected to the defendant being released.

According to charging documents, the defendant was standing near Junior Niko-Semo, the 19-year old who was killed at the festival, at the time the first shots were fired.

Witnesses told police that the 15-year-old defendant pulled a firearm from a pouch and shot in the direction of the shots.

When he was arrested, he told officers, “I was getting shot at” and that he shot back in self-defense, according to court documents.

Law enforcement has confirmed that the gun the teen was carrying at the time of his arrest does not match the bullets removed from the three people killed, according to court documents.

Barnes only drew from human experience, never from photos. He called his documentary body of work Drawing on the Run. Some series chronicled his travels across Mexico, Cambodia, and New Orleans, but many are scenes from Capitol Hill. Series like Seattle Celebrities, Vermillion, and Pike and Nowhere are full of familiar faces: Lelah Maupin, Bethany Jean Clement, Timothy Rysdyke, Mimi Allen, Siolo Thompson, Kelly O, Casey Weldon, Ezra Dickinson. Liz Orth, Lisa Prank, and Zoe Scofield. And places: Chop Suey, the Royal Room, Vito’s, Bait Shop, Bimbo’s, Cha Cha, Cafe Racer, Vermillion, The Annex Theatre, Noc Noc, Comet Tavern, Pony, the Frye Art Museum.

I find myself returning to a passage from Chris Kraus’s 1999 essay “Pussy Orphanage”: “When an artist dies before his or her time, who manages the estate and how, becomes vitally important.” She continues: “Altruism aside, how is it that any artist’s work will come to survive for others in the future? Works of art, after all, are mute and can’t speak for themselves.”

Barnes’s chosen family—the poets, artists, bar owners, and hell-raisers—are speaking for the art. A retrospective of rescued work will be on view at Vermillion, a place he loved, through October 3. It is aptly titled The road goes on forever and the party never ends. The man chose his family well.