Robert Kettle

Grocery chains say Seattle's new law jeopardizes discount loyalty programs that are set up to help shoppers save.

Councilmember Bob Kettle was among the two no votes on this legislation.

You can require a discount to be available to everyone, but then you can't require business to keep offering that discount.

Outside of the experiment on Instacart, we asked Rink on whether she could confirm if any grocery chain was currently surveillance pricing.

What are the law's early supporters saying now?

So Council Member Bob Kettle, he has talked about it in public committee meetings.

He's the public committee safety chair, and he says that it's an underutilized tool.

Recently, I spoke to the former city attorney, Ann Davison, who was in office whenever SOAP and SODA were put into place.

She was one of the main architects.

And she agreed with Bob Kettle that it was supposed to be a tool in the toolbox to address drug-related crimes, prostitution-related crimes, and it was not supposed to be the fix for all of it, but rather a intervention, part of the bigger solutions that we have, like LEAD and CARE and all those other services.

What did Seattle Police say about...

You know, because like you said, these laws are still on the books.

But man, what a process ahead.

I did want to touch on this, though, because Councilmember Kettle has really been putting a lot of pressure on the mayor.

Yet another open letter here, if you will.

He's asking for an explanation of why she asked for Barnes' resignation after the Bido Seattle shooting.

Talk to me about that, just the pressure that's coming from the council over this resignation, the resignation she asked for from Barnes.

Yes, and I'm glad you brought this up right after the process thing, the process ahead, because my understanding, Brian, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, but when Wilson does choose a new police chief, that selection will have to go through Bob Kettle's public safety committee.

So they do need to work together at least a little bit.

from what I understand.

I mean, just kind of continuously about the fact that she fired the police chief, something she has every right to do.

Bob Kettle, a city council member, keeps putting out press release after press release.

And every single time, you know, the Seattle Times dutifully serves as stenographer and says, I mean, they had a headline that was like, Bob Kettle still says that Katie Wilson needs to explain more about why she fired the police chief.

Cairo Radio, Sandeep, your friends, Spike and Mike or whatever their names are, Going off

– Jake and Spike.

But sure, I mean, TV media, absolutely as well.

But I mean, no, I mean, Public Hollow, which I run, I'm not going to like, I mean, yes, I didn't.

Like I said, I didn't cover the letter that Katie Wilson wrote about why she fired the police chief, because that letter was essentially in response to Bob Kettle carping and carping and carping about the bite of Seattle.

And it's been now almost a month and a half.

And you kind of have a drip drip of like, oh, the chamber does a poll, then Bob Kettle hosts this press conference that I was at that invited a bunch of corporate media where he basically announced nothing of substance, but just used it to kind of score political points against the mayor.

And now you have these businesses sending a letter, and it just seems like they're trying to occupy the news agenda and really put Katie Wilson on the defensive.

Now, I know she will have her own things to say in the future, but she's been working on a gun violence program and prevention policy that hopefully we'll hear more about soon.

And so, yeah, I mean, I think the release of these messages was, in fact, vindicating for the Wilson administration, but I do think that the media is largely portraying them in the opposite light.

I think I saw a third story on a city council member, Bob Kettle, saying that the mayor did a bad job and shouldn't have fired the former police chief.

So...

You know, that's the narrative we're going to keep getting spoon fed.