Lewis Powell’s oligarchic legal attack machine continues to target Washington schools with manufactured legal battles.

by Austin Field

Last month marked the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court opinion declaring racially segregated schools unconstitutional. Brown v. Board’s 70th anniversary is a somber one, as one of America’s most celebrated legal decisions faces a legacy of failure. The Supreme Court justices who unanimously condemned school segregation and white supremacy in 1954–and Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case before he joined the court–would be horrified to learn that American schools are now more racially segregated than at any point since the late 1960s. 

A small group of white Seattle parents played an outsized role in Brown’s failure. In 2007, they allied with powerful conservative attorneys to make Brown unenforceable in Parents involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS). US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a lifelong foe of legal efforts to combat racism, used Seattle parents’ lawsuit to attack the civil rights movement itself—part of a plan begun decades before Seattle parents brought their lawsuit.

The story of PICS illustrates how powerful interests have manipulated the court system to roll back hard-won civil rights victories without explicitly overruling treasured precedents like Brown. Today, Seattleites live with the results of that attack: our local schools are as segregated as they were under the Nixon Administration. As our long-segregated school system braces for a round of school closures—closures that I believe are all but guaranteed to harm the very students Brown sought to help—we must critically examine how Seattle parents became pawns in a much larger fight.

Decades of Reactionary Planning Laid the Groundwork to End School Integration

There are a few excellent articles, including a 2016 Stranger article, summarizing Seattle’s flawed, decades-long attempts to desegregate schools, so I’ll skip to the late 1990s. Mandatory busing collapsed in the face of attacks from both reformers and conservatives, and by 1999 the district had adopted a new plan allowing students to attend any public school in Seattle—provided the school had space. If too many students chose a particular school, then the district used several factors as tie-breakers. The second-most important tie-breaker was racial diversity, which specifically considered the student’s race and the racial demographics of their desired school. 

Powerful, reactionary interests saw Seattle Public Schools’ milquetoast efforts to encourage school diversity as an opportunity to roll back the civil rights movement, including Brown v. Board of Education. Their campaign began in 1971, when they coalesced behind a plan outlined by Lewis Powell Jr.—a plan that ultimately included Seattle parents’ PICS lawsuit. 

In 1971, Powell was a wealthy attorney who sat on 11 corporate boards, including Philip Morris. He’d already refused to join the US Supreme Court, preferring to add to his considerable fortune. He spent most of his career vociferously defending Philip Morris’s efforts to deny smoking was harmful–arguing the corporation had a First Amendment right to deceive the public. He wasn’t a fan of everyone’s First Amendment rights, though; he harshly criticized Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns. 

Powell’s pro-corporate, anti-civil rights bona fides attracted the US Chamber of Commerce, which commissioned him to write a memo outlining strategies for rolling back the civil rights movement, the labor movement, the consumer rights movement, the environmental movement, and other threats to oligarchy–all of which seemed, briefly, to be winning. 

Powell delivered, writing 6,400 words identifying “[l]labor unions, civil rights groups and now public interest law firms” as major threats to corporate power. Although unions had only haltingly embraced the call for racial equality, by the 1950s some powerful labor leaders understood that ending racism and ending corporate oligarchy were the same fight—a fight to redistribute national wealth more equitably. Recognizing their common interests, the United Auto Workers partially financed the NAACP’s fight to get Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court. 

Powell correctly viewed labor unions and civil rights groups as existential threats to an economic system that had made him extremely wealthy. He advised corporations to fight back, in part, by creating a network of foundations and nonprofit law firms to defeat the civil rights movement in the courts. He also finally, grudgingly, accepted Nixon’s second invitation to become a Supreme Court Justice—allowing him to rule on legal arguments advanced by these new corporate legal nonprofits. One of those nonprofits, the Pacific Legal Foundation, became the driving force behind the PICS lawsuit.

Powerful Interests Manufactured a Grassroots Lawsuit

The standard story of PICS typically begins with Kathleen Brose, a parent outraged after her daughter was assigned to Franklin High School—then only 6% white—instead of overwhelmingly white Ballard High School. Brose, so the story goes, then founded a nonprofit, Parents Involved in Community Schools, to fight for her daughter all the way to the US Supreme Court. 

But lawsuits don’t get to the Supreme Court without someone spending millions of dollars. Fortunately, attorney Cara Sandberg dug deep into the powerful, wealthy interests who manufactured the PICS suit. While a group of frustrated parents did try organically to challenge the district’s racial tie-breaker, most of them had no interest in suing the district. The few who did, including former Republican Congressman John Miller, formed PICS. 

Miller convinced the Seattle office of powerful corporate law firm Davis Wright Tremaine to represent PICS pro bono. Harry Korrell, who was—and remains—a Davis Wright Tremaine partner, represented PICS for free. Korrell is a longtime member of the Federalist Society, one of the corporate-backed groups created to execute Lewis Powell’s oligarchic, anti-civil rights strategy. He was assisted by lawyers from another such group: the Pacific Legal Foundation. The Foundation provided both legal arguments for Korrell and media coaching for Brose. Brose, a more relatable figure than the elite Miller, was made the public face of the lawsuit. 

Backed by corporate lawyers and corporate nonprofits, PICS lost in lower courts but found a sympathetic ear at the US Supreme Court in 2007. Chief Justice John Roberts, like Korrell a veteran of Lewis Powell’s corporate legal movement, wrote the leading opinion. Roberts didn’t explicitly overrule Brown and bring back Jim-Crow-style mandatory school segregation. Instead, he banned government policies intended to proactively integrate schools. Under Brown, school districts can’t force all the white kids into one school and all the Black kids into another. But, under Roberts’s PICS ruling, Seattle couldn’t do anything intended to make schools more racially balanced. 

Roberts’s ruling rested on two false premises. First, he argued that the Constitution didn’t allow Seattle to consider race in school admissions because Seattle school segregation resulted from residential segregation caused by individual choices—not government policies. This laughably inaccurate claim needs no debunking, though law professor Richard Rothstein thoroughly shredded it in his book the Color of Law. 

Second, and more perniciously, Roberts willfully misinterpreted Brown, turning a color-conscious decision into a colorblind one. Roberts argued that Brown condemned ever racially classifying students. But Brown was not about classifying all children by race, Brown was about classifying Black children by race. Roberts failed to understand—or deliberately ignored—that Brown prohibited classifying and segregating Black students because whites were using school segregation to perpetuate the myth of Black inferiority. Roberts used PICS to transform Brown from a unanimous condemnation of white supremacy into a gag order preventing schools from even acknowledging obvious racial disparities. 

Roberts’s false claims yielded real results. A few optimists tried to argue that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s tie-breaking opinion—which attempted to salvage Brown’s legacy by allowing some limited school integration policies—was the actual law of the land. But Justice Kennedy is gone, and his successors do not believe that the Constitution allows schools to undo generations of racial discrimination. 

Seattle bowed to the court and abandoned its halting school integration efforts. Davis Wright Tremaine added insult to injury, spending years trying to force the Seattle Public Schools to pay $2 million in Borse’s legal fees. 

Lewis Powell’s corporate legal attack machine continues to target Washington schools with manufactured legal battles, from the Bremerton praying coach case to moral panics about “critical race theory.” Their goal isn’t just to end school integration, it’s to create permanent oligarchy by destroying public education entirely, subsidizing private school tuition for wealthy families, and depriving everyone else of a quality education.

PICS was part of this oligarchic campaign. Wealthy elitists used Seattle parents to gut Brown as part of a decades-long campaign designed to stamp out any whisper of a simple, obvious idea: the current distribution of wealth and power in America is unbelievably, violently unjust. The elitists seem to be ascendant, seizing control of school boards nationwide and dominating the Supreme Court. But Brown isn’t just a court decision. Brown is, and always will be, a simple, powerful acknowledgement that white supremacy is evil. Brown reminds us of a period of vibrant, brilliant, joyful, successful resistance—a time when the powerful and their lackeys were justifiably, gloriously afraid of losing their ill-gotten gains. We can make them afraid again.

The Stranger

The Stranger’s morning news roundup.

by Ashley Nerbovig

Heyoo, good morning.  Damn, the National Weather Service says maybe some thunderstorms today with a high near 63 degrees, with winds reaching 25 miles per hour. Make sure your smols stay indoors today, or else the winds could lift them away. 

Vacant building fire: One person is dead and another is in critical condition this morning after an apartment building on Roosevelt Way Northeast and Northeast 63rd Street caught fire. Fire crews treated two other people found in the building. A fire last month had led the City to condemn the building, according to KING 5. Three people died in vacant building fires last year. The Mayor introduced legislation to demolish these buildings faster. Of course, the Mayor could instead provide housing to people who are forced to live in condemned buildings. 

Roosevelt Way NE & NE 63rd St.: One of the patients that was in critical condition has succumbed to their injuries and was declared deceased at the scene.

— Seattle Fire Dept. (@SeattleFire) June 4, 2024

Kent Police scheduled to sweep migrants Tuesday: The Kent Police Department plan to crack down on 200 asylum-seekers who city governments keep shooing from place-to-place. The asylum-seekers have camped right next door to an Econo Lodge that King County owns and could open as a temporary shelter for the migrants, but they won’t due to some dispute with the city. Hannah has more.

King County Superior Court changes rules around evictions: King County Superior Court has adopted an emergency court room that allows some eviction cases to go before civil court judges instead of King County’s three commissioners. The cases must involve some sort of public health or safety risk. Housing Justice Project’s Edmund Witter said he doesn’t have a problem with the court revisiting the rules around evictions to allow more access to the legal system. However, the court made the change without stakeholder feedback and created a “messy” system for tenants to navigate, which could result in people losing housing, even if they have strong cases against eviction. Witter also has concerns about how the new system can be weaponized against people with behavioral health problems, who have the most trouble navigating these systems and who are the most likely to end up homeless.

INBOX: In an emergency rule amendment, King County Superior Court will allow some eviction cases to go before judges instead of commissioners. Landlords will first need to prove a health or safety risk. Seems targeted to allow evictions to go more quickly in some cases. pic.twitter.com/gEPuMGexoA

— Ashley Nerbovig (@AshleyNerbovig) June 3, 2024

Seattle assistant chief back to work: Interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr has reinstated SPD Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis as the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) investigates a complaint brought against him by the Community Police Commission, according to the Seattle Times. The details of the complaint have yet to be made public.

Lawsuit over pet pig slaughter: Some guy sent to kill some pigs in Port Orchard last month took a wrong turn and ended up killing a family’s pet pigs. Now the owners of the pigs have filed a lawsuit against the 29-year-old who killed the wrong animals, according to the Washington Post. Crazy that I have to sign for packages, but not one for someone to come shoot an animal in my backyard. That should probably be a policy. When I open my butcher shop, I’m going to make that a policy.

SPD officers disciplined for delayed response to domestic violence call: The OPA has finished its investigation into a complaint against two officers who sat at a Starbucks for about 40 minutes while a domestic violence suspect attempted to enter a victim’s house, which I reported on back in September. DivestSPD has the full update on the investigation, but OPA basically said that even if the officers involved considered the call to be a low priority, “it was higher than socializing at Starbucks.”

Biden plans to close border to asylum-seekers: The president plans to sign an executive order that allows the US to shut down the border after the number of crossings exceeds a daily threshold, according to the Guardian. Biden plans to hold a press conference at 11 am PDT. He must be trying to save gas with the way he’s taking all these right turns. 

Also, according to the Guardian, at a campaign event in New York Biden called out Trump for the whole becoming a convicted felon thing. Voters who decide to choose Biden over Trump because of this annoy me. People who let the legal system decide for them who to trust have a fucked up sense of the world.   

breaking news reports lost no time amplifying the stigma of a criminal record pic.twitter.com/1bEcaAVYoq

— jon ben-menachem (@jbenmenachem) May 30, 2024

But maybe Biden has a messaging plan: Hunter Biden’s own felony trial began Tuesday. The poor guy had to give up his plea agreement deal after Republicans decried it as special treatment. He tried to make it his choice by saying he was mad about the Justice Department targeting him. Maybe if the case ends in Hunter Biden’s conviction, Joe Biden will be like, “See, some people with felonies should be president, like my second-favorite son.” I’m not hopeful. 

Another good one from The Number Ones: One of my top music columns from Stereogum dropped a new good column last week reviewing “Fancy,” the 2014 hit by Iggy Azalea, “a white Australian woman who rapped in a Black American accent.” Give it a scroll as you listen to a song that will not leave your brain for hours afterward.

The Stranger

This chaotic situation marks only the latest episode of instability and uncertainty for the 200 migrants.

by Hannah Krieg

Kent police officers delivered a 48-hour eviction notice Sunday afternoon to about 200 asylum-seekers mostly from Angola, Congo, and Venezuela, who set up camp in a field next to the Kent Econo Lodge hotel on June 1. If the refugees don’t leave by Tuesday at 3:17 pm, then they will be subject to arrest for trespassing. 

According to a Monday Instagram post, the asylum-seekers plan to stay, and they asked community members to stand with them as they attempt to stop the sweep. Rosario Lopez, an advocate from Super Familia, said the migrants don’t have anywhere to go—except maybe the empty hotel that the county owns right next door. 

“We are camping outside a hotel that could serve as an emergency shelter, but instead of opening the hotel they chose to call the police on hundreds of migrants,” Lopez said. “So they would rather send us to jail than to a shelter.”

Advocacy groups, including Super Familia King County, South King County Mutual Aid, Global Solidarity Network Seattle, Congolese Angolan Movement, and Comunidades Sin Fronteras, asked community supporters to call and email the members of the Kent City Council, Kent Mayor Dana Ralph, the members of the King County Council, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and others to demand they open the Econo Lodge as emergency shelter for the refugees for 90 days.

As the Seattle Times reported this morning, King County bought the Econo Lodge in 2020 and used the 85-unit facility as a COVID-19 quarantine site. Now it’s empty and seems like a natural fit for the 200 or so asylum-seekers. A press release from advocacy groups working with the asylum-seekers said that “[d]ue to King County and the City of Kent’s conveniently intractable bureaucratic disputes, the entire EconoLodge only is home to cars from a local dealership, and the state is sending police instead of services. A small change on the part of King County government and Kent City officials could rapidly ensure emergency housing for hundreds of people.”

Asylum-seekers and their allies asked King County to reopen the Econo Lodge back in April, too. At the time, King County Executive spokesperson Kristin Elia said, “No, the county does not have plans to reopen the hotel. The county is in continued conversations with the state and local jurisdictions on a long-term, statewide approach to provide support for asylum-seekers.”

Elia did not respond to my request for comment about the group’s renewed demand. I will update if she does.

This chaotic situation marks only the latest episode of instability and uncertainty for the 200 migrants. Local governments, including Seattle, Tukwila, Kent, and King County have played hot potato with this particular group for months. The refugees pitch tents, public pressure mounts, and a local government or private donor foots the bill for a few nights or weeks in a hotel, only for the cycle to repeat itself when the money dries up and they get kicked out. But localities maintain that a more permanent solution will come when the State releases $32 million for shelter and resources for migrants and asylum-seekers on July 1. 

The Stranger

Hannah Gadsby, The Black Trans Comedy Showcase, and More Top Picks

by EverOut Staff

Welcome to the first full week of June! Spend some time at tip-top events from Hannah Gadsby: Woof! to to Jon Batiste’s Uneasy Tour and from TRANSlations: 19th Annual Seattle Trans Film Festival to Lavender Rights Project Presents The Black Trans Comedy Showcase. For a look at what’s in store for the rest of the month, check out our June event guide.

MONDAY
LIVE MUSIC

Echo & The Bunnymen
You can easily identify the famed post-punk quartet Echo & The Bunnymen from their full-bodied vocals, ethereal instrumentation, and wind-tossed hairstyles (set in place with lots of hairspray, of course). Let them add some doom and gloom to the spring season (we need more, right?) with songs like “The Killing Moon” and “Lips Like Sugar” as they bring their Songs to Learn and Sing tour to Seattle. AUDREY VANN
(Showbox SoDo, SoDo)

The Stranger

Wedding Couples Should Know About This Aphrodisiac

They can be stressful with a desire for them to perfect. Wedding couples should about this aphrodisiac used for centuries!

The post Wedding Couples Should Know About This Aphrodisiac appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

The Stranger’s morning news roundup.

by Nathalie Graham

Did you have a nice atmospheric river? Sunday’s rain broke June rainfall records in Seattle, Olympia, and Hoquiam, but the system isn’t done. Precipitation should return Monday evening. Western Washington could see its typical amount of total rainfall in June across just three days. As for Monday in Seattle, it’ll be gusty, one of those days that makes your blinds snap if you leave the windows open.

With 0.65” of rain, yesterday was Seattle’s wettest June 2 on record.

Previous mark was 0.48” from 2001

— Seattle Weather Blog (@KSeattleWeather) June 3, 2024

Okay, maybe you didn’t have a nice atmospheric river: Thousands of people were without power Monday morning. Seattle City Light registered 28 active power outages. 

And, yet, drought: Even though summer is still weeks away, drought has already set in across much of Washington. Suboptimal snow pack means abnormally dry conditions, and farmers are already feeling the thirst as they’re struggling to keep their crops sufficiently irrigated. The Roza Irrigation District in the Yakima River Basin drained its irrigation canal for 10 days last month in an effort to preserve water for the driest months ahead, but in doing so the basin shut off water access for farmers. The likely impact of this will be smaller harvests as farmers cut back their production acreage. 

Big weekend for car crashes: During the Gig Harbor Maritime Parade on Saturday, a van in the parade suddenly accelerated and mowed down several people before crashing into a different van. Five people sustained injuries and four of them were taken to the hospital. It’s unclear what caused the driver to accelerate like that. 

Clusterfuck on I-5 kills one: At around 4 am on Sunday morning, a motorhome hit and killed a 26-year-old woman near the West Seattle Bridge after a different car collided with her and she stepped out of her car to investigate. A passing ambulance stopped to help, but then a different car slammed into the ambulance, flipping it and striking the woman again. The 33-year-old driver who struck the ambulance is under investigation for driving under the influence. 

Multiple wrong-way drivers cause crashes: On Sunday morning at around 2:15 am, a 23-year-old woman driving the wrong way on State Route 512 struck and killed two people. The suspect, who is suspected of drinking and driving, had an infant in her car. A different person crashed into two different cars while driving the wrong way on Interstate 705 near Tacoma. The victims of the crashes sustained non-life threatening injuries. The suspect was arrested on suspicion of DUI. Please, stop drinking and driving! I promise it will be way easier to go the right direction on the freeway and also not murder people if you aren’t driving drunk. 

Hundreds line up to vote for Mexican president: Mexico held its national election on Sunday, and 1.4 million of its citizens abroad were eligible to vote. Hundreds of those citizens lined up in Capitol Hill at the Consulado de México en Seattle, which runs out of the old Harvard Exit building. People waited hours, some an entire day. The consulate only had four voting booths despite expecting a huge crowd of voters from Idaho, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington. The Portland consulate wasn’t open for voting. 

Hundreds wait for an opportunity to vote at the Mexican Consulate. 4 voting machines for thousands of people from WA, OR, ID, and AK. People are angry and a gathering is planned at 530 when voting ends. Blame being placed on EINE, the voting organization in Mexico. pic.twitter.com/yiL4ZRLAiu

— Alex Garland (@AGarlandPhoto) June 2, 2024

Mexico elects first woman president: Based on the election’s preliminary returns, Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and Mexico City’s former mayor, is expected to become Mexico’s first woman president. Sheinbaum, a leftist, is a member of the current ruling party in Mexico, the Morena party. She is expected to receive up to 60% of the vote. I’m jealous of Mexico. 

Cop shoots blind Shih Tzu named Teddy: A tiny Missouri town was just radicalized. Sturgeon, Missouri residents are up in arms after a police officer from its two-officer police department shot and killed a missing dog. The officer shot it because he believed it had rabies. In fact, the dog, Teddy, was blind. Now, the mayor has resigned for initially defending the offending cop, the new mayor suspended the cop, Teddy’s owner has filed a civil rights lawsuit seeking over $1 million in damages, and the many town residents are ready to dismantle their police department. 

Sort of a Footloose situation: The Gila River Indian Community in Arizona issued a ban on dances after a tribal police officer was fatally shot while responding to a disturbance at a residence holding a teenager’s birthday party. Another responding officer was wounded. 

Atlanta’s main issue: On Friday, several of Atlanta’s primary water mains experienced a break, causing a large portion of the city to go without water. To make matters worse, several other water mains started experiencing breaks across the city during the weekend. While crews are patching up the mains, thousands of Atlantans remain under a boil-water advisory. 

A sea-level eviction: Around 300 families who have spent their lives on the small Panamanian Island of Gardi Sugdub are packing up and moving to the mainland as sea-level rise makes life on the island harder and harder. Every November and December, ocean water floods the streets. Stronger storms buffet the island. The heat is unbearable. The families will move to a government-developed site on mainland Panama. Some have chosen to remain on the island, their home, until it’s no longer safe. 

The rankings are out! The United States Postal Service released its rankings for cities where its mail carriers were bitten by dogs the most. Top of the list is Los Angeles, with 65 mail carrier dog bites in 2023. Seattle isn’t on the list, but Portland ranked with 19 dog bites. Keep your dogs inside and train them not to fucking bite people, especially not our heroes at the USPS. 

It’s USPS National Dog Bite Awareness Week! Did you know incidents involving dog attacks on Postal Service employees rose to more than 5,800 cases last year? Help keep your letter carrier safe by securing your dog before the carrier approaches your property. #dogbiteawareness pic.twitter.com/ZiFiEQm2yS

— National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (@NRLCA) June 3, 2024

Ugh, this shit again: Hunter Biden is in court today for jury selection in his federal gun trial, a case that stems from three felonies he incurred when purchasing a gun in 2018 while on crack. Here are the charges, according to the Associated Press: “He has been accused of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application used to screen firearms applicants when he said he was not a drug user, and illegally having the gun for 11 days.” Biden has pleaded not guilty. Daddy Biden, the president, issued a statement saying he has “boundless love for my son, confidence in him, and respect for his strength.”

The judge in the trial dealt a few blows to Biden’s defense when she blocked an expert witness meant to poke holes in the claims of Biden’s addiction in 2018. The judge also blocked a piece of evidence that was “an altered version of the federal firearms form he filled out when he bought the gun in 2018 that was tweaked in 2021 by the gun store employees,” CNN reports. The defense wanted to use that evidence to undermine the gun store employees’ credibility. 

No Israelis in the Maldives: The president of the Maldives made the move to ban Israeli passport holders from entering his island paradise of a country due to the ongoing war in Gaza.

A song for a windy day: Is this too on the nose? Here’s a link to a live version, too. 

The Stranger

Eight Weeks Are Up, but Hours Are Still Down

by Hannah Krieg

The Seattle Public Library (SPL) did not bounce back after its planned eight weeks of rolling closures from April 12 to June 2. With significantly less fanfare than their announcement in April, SPL unveiled new summer hours starting June 20 that reshuffle the closures but cut an additional 11 hours of service per week across its 27 locations. SPL did not give The Stranger a clear end date to the service cuts, but it doesn’t seem as if the Library wants to get patrons’ hopes up for much to change until budget season this fall. And that’s assuming the anti-tax corporatists who run this City feel compelled in any way to choose public goods over austerity. 

Eight Weeks 

On April 11, The Stranger broke the news that SPL would cut nearly 1,500 service hours over eight weeks because they did not have the staffing necessary to keep libraries open. Chief Librarian Tom Fay and Mayor Bruce Harrell struck a deal, granting SPL limited exemptions from his hiring freeze on all departments except for cops, fire, and the new dual dispatch program. Technically, SPL is not under the Mayor’s purview and they don’t have to adhere to the freeze, but he signs the budget, so there’s a strategy to playing nice with him. #OneSeattle. 

SPL spokesperson Laura Gentry said they would use the eight weeks to hire 12 more mostly temporary staff members, but she made no guarantees that they would restore service hours at the end of that period or after hiring the new workers. The Stranger asked Gentry how many people SPL hired since the reductions took effect, but she said she’s having difficulty accessing that information after the recent ransomware event. The ransomware event “complicated [SPL’s] onboarding process, along with a whole lot of other processes, but [SPL’s] HR team is looking for creative ways to welcome new hires despite the technology outage,” she wrote in an email. 

Regardless of how many people SPL hired in the last eight weeks, it’s not enough to fully restore hours for summer when more school-age kids and those seeking refuge from the heat will seek their facilities. 

New Hours, Same Sadness

According to the new hours posted on SPL’s blog, Capitol Hill and High Point will reopen on Sundays, South Park will reopen on Mondays, Montlake will reopen for a partial day on Tuesdays, and Douglass-Truth will reopen on Saturdays. According to SPL’s blog, the new schedule increases hours at larger, heavily used locations with air conditioning in anticipation of a hot, dry summer ahead.

On the other hand, SLP announced new closures for Deldrige, Chinatown International District (CID), New Holly, and Northgate on Sundays, and the University Branch on Saturdays. That puts CID, New Holly, Northgate, and University branches at two closures per week. Fremont and High Point will close two hours earlier on Tuesday and Wednesday. University Branch’s hours will shift two hours early on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the branch will still be open eight hours both days. 

Your Move, Mayor

Gentry did not have a lot of information about the future of the libraries—”The short answer is: We are still waiting to learn more about our financial situation in 2025, and we should have a better understanding of our staffing capacity once the Mayor announces his proposed budget this fall. We have hired a few new staff and continue to work on hiring, but those positions are helping to create more stability rather than to expand hours.”

The Mayor’s Office did not respond to a question about the future SPL’s budget. Instead, mayoral spokesperson Karissa Braxton said, “The ongoing budget process has no impact on the summer hours announced by the Libraries last week.”

But that statement ignores the reality that the new schedule continues service cuts brought on by a staffing shortage that SPL cannot address until they see how austere the Mayor goes with his budget proposal. Braxton did not respond to my follow-up questions. 

SPL’s staffing capacity will be but one line item in the Mayor’s and the city council’s budget, which they will endeavor to balance either by raising revenue or by cutting programs and staff in the face of a $250 million shortfall. Council Member Tammy Morales came out in immediate support of pumping new revenue into the libraries to increase capacity.

“This is a wake-up call for our city,” Morales said in an April 11 press release. “Without urgent action, things will get so much worse than this.”

Other council members have not taken strong stances in support of new progressive revenue to restore service at the libraries. 

The council does not have a clear progressive-revenue-supporting majority—likely because most of them have corporate donors to please. Budget Chair Dan Strauss supported new revenue during his campaign, but he is holding off on implementing any until the fall. The council member who should care the most, Chair of the Libraries, Education, and Neighborhoods Committee Martiza Rivera, didn’t jump to throw money at SPL but rather blamed the Library’s budget issues on e-books and the union. I asked Rivera (again) if the recent closures have inspired her to support new revenue and she did not respond. 

The Stranger

A New Yakitori Joint Opens, Bar Bayonne Is Named One of America’s Best Bars, and Brouwer’s Cafe Says Goodbye

by EverOut Staff

This week, we’re scoping out skewered meats and sushi at the new spot Ooshiba Yakitori & Sushi, mourning the loss of the pioneering craft beer favorite Brouwer’s Cafe, and getting excited about Jollibee‘s upcoming opening. Plus, Bar Bayonne has been proclaimed one of the nation’s best bars by Esquire. For more ideas, check out our food and drink guide.
NEW OPENINGS 

Ooshiba Yakitori & Sushi
Japanese chefs Hirotaka Muramtsu and Hiroshi Kakuta, the team behind the pop-up Ooshiba, recently launched this permanent location in the same building as Figurehead Brewing in Fremont. The restaurant offers a range of sushi rolls and sashimi, as well as yakitori and kushiyaki.
Fremont

The Stranger