A few days before the August 5 primary election, I was surprised to see a new TikTok account appear from the City of Seattle – which, for the first few weeks of its existence, featured Mayor Bruce Harrell in every video.
I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Hannah Krieg at The Burner reported on the new account on August 21, noting that only after she requested a comment about the Harrell-heavy content did the City TikTok account post content that didn’t include Harrell. Krieg also reported that the City’s Instagram account, which had already been in existence well before the primary, had also been heavily featuring Harrell in its content.
My eyebrows went up even further when I read in a Seattle Times article by Jim Brunner and David Kroman a few days ago that Harrell had been paying Christian Sinderman, his campaign consultant, out of mayor’s office funds for several years. Brunner and Kroman rightly described this arrangement as “unusual.” Sinderman is the founder and principal of NWP Consulting, a high-powered political consulting and lobbying firm with a large client list.
What surprised me about these stories is how the behavior they describe flew in the face of advice and training my colleagues and I had received in early 2013 from members of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, including its director Wayne Barnett, about the rules barring the use of City resources to campaign for office. At the time, I worked as Senior Communications Advisor to Mayor Mike McGinn, who was gearing up for a reelection bid that he narrowly lost.
As one of the lead communications staffers in the McGinn Administration, I sat through trainings and read notes that were given to us by independent City staff to guide our work during the upcoming reelection campaign. We already knew that we could not use any City resources to do campaign work, including City-owned computers, cellular phones, seattle.gov email addresses, office space, or the secure non-public WiFi.
We were additionally told that if we wanted to do anything related to the campaign, we had to physically leave the mayor’s office, use public WiFi on our own personal computers, and be sure to mark on our Outlook calendars that we were out of the office and not doing campaign tasks on the public’s dime.
