Forbes writer, Rantz debate whether council based head tax vote on a report

On Wednesday, Forbes contributor Roger Valdez published a piece on Forbes’ website stating that the McKinsey & Company report upon which Seattle City Councilmember M. Lorena Gonzalez based her statement before the head tax vote that the city needs $400 to adequately address the homeless crisis never existed.

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“I didn’t get anything spectacularly wrong,” Valdez told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson. “We sourced this, we had multiple people that contributed and gave information.”

KTTH’s Jason Rantz wrote an article on MyNorthwest the same day explaining what Valdez had written.

However, later that evening, after receiving a document from Gonzalez’ staff that they named as the report, Rantz published a follow-up in which he stated that there was indeed a report given to the council.

Valdez, however, maintained that his work was factual because the “report” sent to Gonzalez had been a 25-page PowerPoint he had already received and made reference to in his story. Valdez did not consider it to be a complete report, but rather a summary document.

“What she sends out is the PowerPoint that I referred to in my original article … and my point was, that wasn’t the final report,” he said, explaining that staff at McKinsey had told him that a report was coming in the near future.

Rantz, however, countered to Dori that “at the time [the council members received it] … it was presented as ‘the report.'”

Regardless of whether there will be a more in-depth report at a later date, at the time of the vote, “they were referring to the PowerPoint as ‘the report,'” Rantz said.

Valdez held, however, that whatever one calls it, the PowerPoint was still more of “a briefing document.”

“It’s not a typical report that’s got citations in it, a methodology, how did we arrive at the conclusions we’re making, the executive summary,” he said.

Dori agreed with Valdez that whatever the council chooses to call the PowerPoint, it is not a true report.

“It’s not a report,” Dori argued. “They can call a cat a dog all they want and it’s still a cat.”

Valdez, who published a follow-up timeline on Forbes, said that the bigger problem, however, is that the “report” — meaning the PowerPoint — was never distributed widely before the vote as such a document should have been. Only four of the five council members in favor of the $500 per employee per head tax were shown the report at an initial briefing, and it wasn’t spread around further — though not much further — until just before the May 14 vote, Valdez said.

“Nobody had that PowerPoint at the time Lorena cited it (May 11) … even if you say that that is the report, it was not circulated, no one had it, no one even had it before the vote except at the last minute,” he said.

Valdez remains steadfastly committed to what he wrote.

“The $400 million number was out and about, it was used as a rationalization of what was happening, and that was based on something that didn’t exist,” Valdez said. “So I stand by what I have in both the post yesterday and the post today.”

Rantz pointed out that regardless of any reports, the council’s mind was already made up in favor of the head tax.

“They had already decided that they were going to go ahead with this head tax to begin with,” he said.

Rantz did acknowledge that he thought “it’s disingenuous to call the PowerPoint a report,” going so far as to call the document “an embarrassment.” He said that the council is certainly taking part in damage control.

Dori chastised the council and city staff for “operating in secrecy.” He said that sent an email to council staff asking if Valdez’ reporting was inaccurate and asking when the PowerPoint was presented to the council, and has received no response to his questions.

“They are in full cover your you-know-what mode at the council right now because Valdez caught them,” Dori said. “And maybe it’s all semantics, but they are not answering legitimate questions.”

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