Why Seattle and King County could use some ‘sewer socialism'

Over the past year, we have seen a troubling array of audits, reports and political recriminations over financial mismanagement of county agencies.

A King County audit of the Department of Community and Human Services in August found unapproved payments and possible fraud. Last week, the county announced it would pull in law enforcement and the state auditor to investigate.

Last month, a damning audit of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority - which, among other things, failed to find a paper trail for $8 million - led some lawmakers to call for KCRHA's dissolution and a deep reevaluation of the troubled six-year-old agency.

The string of alarming news over the use of public dollars is not just bad publicity. It reveals a need for much stronger levels of transparency, rigor, accountability and, most critical, effectiveness.

For the public to continue to support investments in direly needed safety net programs, violence prevention and efforts to end homelessness, the investments need to yield meaningful results.

I have been thinking about this a lot since the election of Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who both ran as democratic socialists, but, even more important, focused their campaigns on the kind of kitchen-table issues top of mind for most people.

Leading that list, of course, is affordability. But a broader thing both campaigns highlighted was the question of how well the government functions and how capable it is of improving quality of life for working people and not just the most affluent.

I remember learning a term during Mamdani's campaign that spoke to this approach: sewer socialism.

The term "sewer socialism" was initially meant as a pejorative, describing a socialist political approach in Milwaukee beginning in 1910 that more radical socialist critics felt was too incremental. It's hard to imagine in our era of socialism-as-bogeyman, but that Midwest city elected three socialist mayors all the way up to 1960. Later, the term came to represent a kind of socialism that Mamdani embraced in his campaign, one that emphasizes pragmatism and public services, or as he told The New York Times, "Delivering public goods coupled with public excellence."

In NYC, this has meant investments in city grocery stores, public bathrooms and, yes, sewers.

Part of that public excellence is also a willingness to take a hard look at how programs and initiatives are functioning and making course corrections as needed.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with Mayor Wilson when I interviewed her earlier this year. She addressed the need for proactive city oversight, but said she can understand why politicians end up in a defensive crouch and are afraid of admitting their decisions have not worked out as they intended.

"It's challenging because obviously you also have limited control over the way that the media ecosystem portrays what you do, right? And so you might come out intending to just be like, ‘Well, we did this. It didn't work.' But I don't know what the right wing media, like influencers, are going to do with that," she said. But she said leaders can't be paralyzed into inaction by that fear.

Wilson said the city, which is facing a $150 million budget deficit for 2027, is taking a close look at where money is going, and she's ready to make potentially hard decisions if necessary. She asked departments to model 5% and 10% reduction scenarios and provide a list of the programs and services they are providing.

"What we're trying to get at is, what are we funding? And then, what outcomes are we getting from it? Or how well is this serving people's needs?" she said.

She added that reprioritizing city funds is politically challenging, and "even people who come into office promising to do that often end up not doing it, because there's always constituencies that are invested in whatever is being funded, even if it's not actually the most effective use of those dollars."

But Wilson said leaders still need to be willing to make those tough calls.

"We can't just assume that just because at some point it was decided to put money into a particular program, that it should always be there forever," she said. "And so I think we do need to measure how things are working and be willing to change course."

Being willing to evaluate progress on an ongoing basis, change course when necessary and stay laser-focused on whether efforts are working should be the building blocks to not just sewer socialism but good, healthy governance. We should be doing that work as a matter of course, not just when a damning audit forces our hand.

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