Ethics concerns surface from Bruce Harrell’s time as Seattle City Council president

It was late summer 2022 when a Seattle city staffer made a risky move.

She’d heard something that unsettled her – a male colleague told her that Bruce Harrell had tried to interfere with a case he had investigated back when Harrell was city council president.

The male colleague had been investigating allegations of wage theft at the Royal Esquire Club, a Black men’s social club in Columbia City. Harrell, board chair of the club at the time, had called the investigator and made him uneasy.

It’s been seven years since Harrell had that conversation with the investigator – but it set into motion a series of events that have called into question whether the current mayor has crossed an ethical line in his aim to protect the Royal Esquire Club when he was Seattle City Council president.

Emails recently obtained by KUOW show that in addition to the phone call, Harrell directed his staff to perform administrative tasks for the club from 2016 to 2018, which could violate city ethics rules.

Harrell said through a spokesperson that he did nothing unethical, as the club was in his district, and council members are supposed to help constituents.

“He has committed no ethical violations,” said spokesperson Jamie Housen, suggesting this story is a political hit piece right before the election.

“No one has complained about these constituent service activities from 10 years ago,” Housen said.

There have been no formal complaints lodged to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission about the emails, which the commission would need to investigate Harrell’s past conduct. But two former city council members and the city’s current head of ethics say that in their view Harrell’s work for the club may have crossed the line.

Wayne Barnett, the head of Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, told KUOW that city council members may serve on boards while in office. What raises questions for him, however, was city staff doing side work at an elected official’s behest.

Barnett said that could violate the city code of ethics, which says officials may not use city personnel “for a purpose which is, or to a reasonable person would appear to be, for other than a city purpose.”

Benjamin Brunjes, associate professor at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy, agreed, saying, “Clearly, there are ethical concerns here.”

“Having an elected leader who can steer resources to a private organization that they're also running is always a problem,” Brunjes said. “We would prefer for any elected leader to step away from any fiduciary responsibility at any private sector organization while they serve.”

Nick Licata, who was a Seattle City Council member for 18 years, said helping constituents to that degree – as Harrell helped the Royal Esquire Club – is not typical.

“You have to ask yourself, how many groups can you afford to do that for?” Licata said. “If it’s just one group and other groups are not getting that service, then it would seem to me to be unfair.”

Former council member Teresa Mosqueda concurred. When asked if this was typical work, she answered plainly: “No.” “We have very specific full-time work at the City of Seattle,” she said.

The 2018 phone call

The investigator told the head of his agency, Martin Garfinkel, director of the Office of Labor Standards, about Harrell calling him. He said that Harrell made what he considered to be a thinly veiled threat about the funding for their office.

“It was highly unusual and very disturbing,” Garfinkel recently told KUOW. Garfinkel told the investigator to file a memo summarizing the call and to continue with the investigation. “It’s a pretty intimidating thing to have an investigator, a rank-and-file employee, be contacted by the president of the city council and be told what he was told, that he has an impact on the budget,” Garfinkel said.

The labor standards office ultimately settled its claim against the Royal Esquire Club in June 2019. The office directed the club to pay one worker $10,674, citing wage theft. Four others were paid $100 to $300 for unpaid sick time.

Meanwhile, the investigator’s memo about Harrell’s phone call languished for three years, until 2021, when Harrell ran for mayor.

A labor advocate named Rich Stolz – who supported Harrell’s then-opponent, Lorena Gonzalez – heard about the call and filed a citizen complaint with the Ethics and Elections Commission.

PubliCola reported on Stolz’s complaint, which the commission ultimately dropped.

When the city staffer heard that the ethics commission wouldn’t look into Harrell’s phone call, she was surprised. She assumed the commission would take the complaint seriously – the city council president interfering with an investigation seemed wrong to her.

She decided she wanted more information than just what she had heard. So the staffer took matters into her own hands and asked the city for records from Harrell’s office related to the Royal Esquire Club. The city gave her about 180 emails, as required by the state public records law.

The staffer, who works for the city, requested anonymity in this story for fear of repercussions to her employment.

She sought the emails to find out why the ethics complaint was closed. But the emails revealed something else: That between 2016 and 2018, Harrell directed his city council staff to perform tasks for the Royal Esquire Club, which did not have secretarial support at the time and relied on leadership to pitch in.

The emails show that the work included filling out insurance paperwork, collecting membership dues, drafting an event proposal, and contacting dozens of people, including city employees, to invite them to club events. On one occasion, Harrell invited Cedric the Entertainer to the club.

City council members help constituents, and the Royal Esquire Club was in District 2, Harrell’s district. But this, to the city staffer, seemed beyond the pale.

KUOW did not receive the emails from the city staffer – instead they came from an intermediary she knows who works for an organization that supports Katie Wilson, Harrell’s opponent in the current mayoral race. That individual declined to comment about possible political motivations in this transfer.

However, the city staffer was willing to tell KUOW about her reasons for supporting the disclosure of the emails.

“I went to great lengths to get this information, but then once I got it, I didn’t even know what to do with it or who to go to,” she told KUOW. “I do believe voters should know. I was a fly on the wall at City Hall long enough to see that accountability for elected officials only comes from the voters.”

The emails

The emails provided to KUOW span from 2016 to 2018 and show Harrell and his staff communicating about routine work for the Royal Esquire Club while using their city email accounts.

In one correspondence, this one from 2016, Cierra Cooper, a city council legislative assistant, acknowledged to other city hall staffers that this work was a priority.

“I know that the Royal Esquire Club tasks take precedence,” Cooper wrote, “but I still want to make sure that I am doing my daily tasks efficiently and in a timely manner.”

Harrell’s office asserted to KUOW that the work for the club did not eclipse work for the city. “My duties were focused on critical administrative support, such as addressing constituent issues and managing other day-to-day tasks as instructed,” Cooper wrote in a statement provided by Harrell’s office.

“Any work related to the Royal Esquire Club was limited and did not come before my primary office responsibilities.”

Chase Munroe, another member of Harrell’s staff involved in assisting the club, wrote to KUOW: “I have always served the city ethically in every role I’ve been fortunate enough to be in,” he said.

“I have a great deal of confidence that Mayor Harrell and I were compliant with the Code of Ethics while he was a City Councilmember. Any implication or representation to the contrary would be extremely unfair and inaccurate.”

It’s unclear from the emails how much time these tasks took to complete. Harrell’s office contends it was minimal.

Harrell steps in

The Royal Esquire Club has a long and storied history in Seattle. At the time it was founded, in 1947, there were no other places for Black men to socialize. But as Seattle changed over the years and became more inclusive, membership waned, and the club faced mounting debt.

By the time Harrell volunteered to join club leadership in 2016, the nonprofit was struggling financially.

Ed Hill, president of the nonprofit at the time, said Harrell helped turn things around when he came on board.

“Bruce’s main strength was that he was good with organization,” Hill said. “He brought a new energy to the club.”

Roberto Jourdan, current president for the Royal Esquire Club, said, “There are a lot of organizations and a lot of venues, Black owned and minority owned, that aren’t around today.

“Whatever district they’re in, they didn’t have someone like Bruce Harrell that would help.” Jourdan said he was surprised a journalist would take issue with Harrell helping their nonprofit.

“Once again, there’s a Black man helping a predominantly Black organization and some people have issue with that,” he said.

Complaint dropped

In 2019, the Office of Labor Standards found that five female workers weren’t adequately paid for their work at the club, which operates primarily as a night club but also provides scholarships and food for unhoused people.

At least one of the women alleged wage theft.

The investigator’s written account of the phone call with Harrell didn’t become public until Harrell ran for mayor in 2021.

That’s when Stolz, who knew people in the labor standards office, heard about the Harrell call through the grapevine.

In a recent conversation with KUOW, Stolz said he filed the complaint with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission because he felt the issue was important.

“I didn’t think it was right that an elected official would be able to attempt to intimidate the office of labor standards or staff from doing their job,” Stolz said.

The investigator Harrell called in 2018 never responded to requests for comment. Ultimately, Barnett, executive director of the commission, collected evidence but never drew a conclusion on the complaint’s merits.

Barnett said he explained this to Stolz, and that Stolz accepted his decision.

Because the complaint was closed, and not dismissed, it cannot be appealed.

Barnett said he did not bring charges against Mayor Harrell for making the phone call for several reasons. He said he had concerns about the strength of the case, which would rely in part on recollections and written accounts of one conversation between two parties three years earlier.

He said he also closed the case out of racial sensitivity.

This followed the civil rights reckoning sparked by the George Floyd protests, Barnett said, and Harrell was the lone Black city councilmember, and the investigation involved a Black-owned social club.

“Prosecuting the city's leading Black official for his work on behalf of a Black social club seemed problematic,” Barnett said in an email to KUOW.

“I am white, and at the time, every member of the Commission was as well. I decided against asking the Commission to fine Bruce Harrell for his work for the Royal Esquire Club.”

Barnett also considered that the complaint had made the news that summer, and voters still chose to elect Harrell in 2021. Barnett said it was the early days of the pandemic and he thought Harrell deserved a chance to govern.

As for the emails that KUOW received last month, Barnett said they could not be investigated, because so far, no complaints have been filed in relation to them.

Brunjes, the public policy professor at the UW, said Barnett’s line of thinking is potentially harmful to the effectiveness of ethical code.

“It's problematic to make ethical choices based on political context, because it will lead to an ethical system that is malleable, that can be used to justify just about anything, and won't lead to the preservation of what we might think of as core public value,” Brunjes said.

As for the woman who got the emails in the first place – she said she held onto the emails not to smear Harrell but “because having it felt like a back-pocket option to protect my team from reprisal or interference.”

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Harrell was elected as Seattle mayor in 2021. He resigned from the Royal Esquire Club before taking office.

He remains connected to the club, however.

On Tuesday night, as the first ballot count drops, he will be at the club, surrounded by family and supporters.