Mayor-elect Bruce Harrell recently announced his transition team and structure as he prepares to take office early next year. He is seeking input from a diverse coalition of voices as he builds his administration and hundred-day and year-one agendas, leading what his team has dubbed the most "racially and ideologically diverse mayoral transition team in Seattle history."

"Inclusion was really a priority throughout the entire process of putting together these teams, and we're still continuing to add members as we speak," Jamie Housen, an associate with Northwest Passage Consulting working with Harrell's team, told the SGN. "The mayor-elect really wanted to make it a priority that we'd have members of as many communities as possible at the table."

Harrell won the Nov. 2 mayoral election by 19 percentage points over M. Lorena Gonzalez, and in January will replace Jenny Durkan, who opted to not run for reelection.

The transition team encompasses over 150 local leaders across 12 topically relevant areas: arts, culture, and nightlife; climate and environment; education and youth; government operations; housing and homelessness; labor and workforce; philanthropy; public health; safety and justice; small and local business; transportation and land use; and sports and mentorship.

Each committee will meet to identify key policies and efforts for Harrell. From there, leaders from each committee will meet with the transition team chairs to identify mutual and overlapping priorities and policy goals.

The transition team will be led by four chairs: former US Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, Equal Opportunity Schools interim CEO Eddie Lincoln, Uwajimaya president and CEO Denise Moriguchi, and Sea Mar founder and CEO Rogelio Riojas.

LGBTQ+ voices
LGBTQ+ leaders and organizations are expected to directly participate in four of the twelve committees.

"Having [LGBTQ voices] present not in any one single committee but in a variety of different places where those issues are present, and where their [voices are] important, and where they can provide representation and speak to the specific issues that affect LGBTQ communities, was just really important," Housen said.

Pride at Work's Marsha Botzer will participate in the labor and workforce committee, and Louise Chernin, former president and CEO of the Greater Seattle Business Association, will work with the small and local business committee. Neither Botzer nor Chernin responded to requests for comment on the upcoming meetings.

LGBTQ+ resource center Gay City plans to participate in the public health committee.

"I'm honored to be asked to serve on Mayor-elect Bruce Harrell's public health transition team, and eager to see how this group can shape a public health agenda for the city that centers those currently furthest from health equity," Fred Swanson, Gay City's executive director, told the SGN in an email.

Drag queen, activist, and behavioral health counselor Aleksa Manila will be joining the transition team's safety and justice committee. When asked about her expectations for these meetings, Manila said that she hopes that all voices are present and heard through these collaborations.

"I simply ask for an equitable seat at the table, [and that] diverse voices heard, lived experiences be shared, while focusing on a perspective that is realistic, harm-reduction based, and truly centers issues [for] the most marginalized, who are often the mostly and deeply impacted when it comes to consequences," Manila told the SGN in an email.

"And lastly, a strengths-based and solution-focused approach to outcomes that truly benefit all," she added. "And if not all, prioritize the most vulnerable, [the] historically, systematically, perpetually neglected when it comes to political transitions like this and ongoing strategies."

Police reform
Kim Bogucki, a Seattle police detective and co-founder of the IF Project, and DeVitta Briscoe, executive director of Not This Time, a community organization focused on policy-based policing reform and reducing fatal police shootings and violence, are also expected to participate on the safety and justice committee, as are other criminal justice reform—focused organizations and state-based public safety agencies.

When asked about having reform-focused organizations on the committee, Housen said reform was a prominent focus of Harrell's campaign and pointed to several proposals he made, including having public safety officers who don't carry badges or guns and ensuring that officers are recruited from the communities they will serve.

"The idea of police reform and criminal legal system reform [has] been a priority for the mayor-elect his entire career, going back to the city council," Housen said, referencing Harrell's work passing Seattle's bias-free policing law in 2017 and advocating for body cameras on Seattle police officers.

"But I think throughout the campaign, what he was able to enunciate in a way that others were not was this balance between the need for effective public safety and the need for reform, and how all these different communities all want to feel safe, and how we achieve that requires... having an effective SPD, but also one that is unbiased and reformist. So that requires a lot of different voices at the table."

In the week following Thanksgiving, the committees will begin meeting, Housen said. The co-leads of each committee will then hold meetings with the transition team chairs to identify mutual goals and build policies as Harrell prepares to take office in January.