Seattle is set to pay $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit filed by city employees who claimed mistreatment after they helped expose the deletion of thousands of text messages from then-Mayor Jenny Durkan and other top officials during the tumultuous summer of 2020.
The lawsuit was filed by Stacy Irwin and Kimberly Ferreiro, who resigned as public-records officers in Durkan's office, alleging hostile conditions and retaliation.
The employees' whistleblower complaint revealed that text messages from Durkan, former Police Chief Carmen Best, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and other officials were intentionally deleted during the summer of 2020. The King County Superior Court case was resolved last month, but the terms of Seattle's settlement with Irwin and Ferreiro were not finalized until this week. The settlement details were released to The Seattle Times through a public disclosure request on Friday.
In addition to the $2.3 million payout, the city has spent over $770,000 on attorneys to defend the case, as of April, according to the outlet. Irwin and Ferreiro claimed they were "subjected to scorn, ridicule, abuse, and hostility and the demand to perform illegal acts."
The pair raised concerns in 2021 when they complained to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC) that the mayor's office was mishandling records requests. An investigation by the SEEC found that the mayor's legal counsel, Michelle Chen, had violated the state Public Records Act by using narrow interpretations of specific requests to exclude Durkan's missing texts and diverged from best practices by not informing requesters that the texts were missing.
Under state law, texts and other communications about public business by local elected officials must be kept for at least two years, and anyone who willfully destroys a public record that is supposed to be preserved is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
The settlement agreement includes $25,000 in lost wages each to Irwin and Ferreiro, with the remainder of the $2.3 million allocated for general damages and attorneys' fees. As part of the settlement, the plaintiffs must drop the case, destroy city documents in their possession, and never pursue jobs in the city again. Both parties are also barred from discussing the settlement amount publicly.
Irwin told The Seattle Times, "There's been no accountability. These officials basically got away with it and the taxpayers are paying." Ferreiro added, "It's still a loss for the citizens of Seattle," as some questions about the actions of city officials "will never be answered."
In August 2022, then-King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg requested that Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall investigate the city officials' deleted texts, but Cole-Tindall's office has not yet announced the results.
Durkan's office previously claimed that an "unknown technology issue" caused the texts to go missing. Still, a city-commissioned forensic report found that Durkan's phone was changed in July 2020 to delete texts automatically after 30 days and stored in the cloud.
A subsequent forensic report commissioned by business owners and residents suing the city over the deadly autonomous zone revealed that Durkan's texts were manually deleted. In February, the city settled that lawsuit for $3.65 million, including $600,000 in penalties for the deleted texts.
The settlement came swiftly after a judge sanctioned the city for destroying evidence and noted that Durkan's excuses "strained credibility." Over 27,000 texts were deleted from Best's phone, and the most recent forensic reports show that phones used by Scoggins and others were reset in October 2020.
In 2022, Seattle paid nearly $200,000 and pledged to improve its public records processes to settle a lawsuit by The Seattle Times that alleged the city had mishandled requests from reporters who asked for messages between city officials. In February, the owner of a Korean restaurant filed a federal lawsuit against the city for the loss of business and expenses incurred during the notorious autonomous zone. Litigation against the city due to the zone has already cost Seattle over $11 million.
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