Ari Hoffman - Did Seattle's crime crisis drive Starbucks away?

Major employers say crime and public safety are shaping where they invest and grow. Has Seattle waited too long to address the problem? Ari Hoffman, host of The Ari Hoffman Show, joins the show to discuss newly released documents, the state's response to crime around Starbucks' headquarters, and what it means for businesses in Seattle.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hey, welcome back to the Lawrence, Lawrence and Show. It's Monday, it's the Radio Northwest Network, and I thought a perfect day to talk to our friend Ari Hoffman, host of the show that follows mine on our Seattle affiliate KVI. Ari, welcome back. Hope you had a great weekend.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

I did. Thanks for having me, buddy.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Hey, I wanted to tell you to tell my audience, because I always try to credit lavishly. I don't think anybody ever got ahead in this business by claiming credit, although there are people in our business who do that for things they didn't actually generate. But you got a hold of some really significant documents when it comes to describing some of uh, I guess, Olympia's last-minute efforts to try to keep Starbucks from moving out of town.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Yeah, so just to fill in your audience, this wasn't something that happened in just a short amount of time, a split-second decision. This was something that was happening over the course of at least two years that we know about. What happened was Bob Ferguson and the Democrats' last legislative session, that's the one before this one in 2025, signed the largest tax increase in state history. A lot of the taxes they hit companies with were affecting their advertising and affecting various digital products because they said, let's milk every dime out of them we can get. Starbucks, one of their CEOs, ran into Bob Ferguson at an event in Seattle and said, Hey, we should talk. And that meeting, as far as I could tell from all these documents I got through public disclosure requests, never happened. So then they, the Democrats, go and pass the income tax here in Washington and several other taxes on companies. And Starbucks says, We're not leaving, but we're leaving, and we're building this big facility in Nashville, and we're gonna be hiring 2,000 people while we're laying off thousands of people here in Washington, which essentially means they're leaving. And then you also have their founder, Howard Schultz, say, I'm out of here, the same day the Democrats are applauding passing their income tax. So now what it appears happened was Bob Ferguson, governor of Washington, in a panic, tries to get a hold of Starbucks and says, Remember that meeting we were supposed to have? Well, we never had it. Let's have it now. And when they have it, the briefing notes on it say they're gonna bring up these taxes, they're gonna bring up this, they're gonna bring up that, but you need to sell them on why these taxes will be good for them. And that was the briefing memo, which is crazy.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Don't you love it when Democrats decide that they can talk somebody into believing that taking more money out of a person or a company's pocket is gonna be good for them in the long term? I mean, are they that delusional?

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Yes, they are. But also don't forget, Starbucks is a pretty lefty, pretty woke company, but even they have their limits because they still have to make a profit. So Ferguson probably figured, oh, I, you know, it's Starbucks and they hang up the pride flag and whatever else they do. We'll be fine, we'll be fine. And now you have look, if you don't know much about Seattle, you know about the Space Seedle, you know about Starbucks, you might know about Boeing, you might know about a few other things. But basically, you have a company that that's what Seattle is known for. They are getting out of here now, and it's because of the Democrats' taxes. And now we have the documentation to prove it. And in fact, what's worse is in the briefing notes for Ferguson, his staff said they're likely to bring up the crime around their headquarters, which by the way is in South Seattle. So they're likely to bring up the crime around their headquarters, and they suggest that he uses the Washington State Patrol to come deal with it. So that's acknowledging the fact that the Seattle Police Department doesn't have enough people to deal with it. King County Sheriff doesn't have enough people to deal with it. So now they got to talk about sending in the Washington State Patrol because there's so much crime around the Starbucks corporate headquarters.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Now, did Bob Ferguson actually seriously consider sending in WSP to deal with the crime problems that Seattle, I think, has largely decided to ignore? It's not just shortage of staff, but the fact is they've got a King County prosecutor's office that doesn't like to prosecute criminals. They do have a city uh attorney's office that does some prosecution of criminals. But were they considering any of that? And did Ferguson actually think maybe if I flush a bunch of state troopers in and kind of quiet crime down for a while, that Starbucks will ignore the fact that they'd closed, I think, a half a dozen of their stores in their hometown because the stores were too dangerous for their staff and too dangerous for their customers.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Well, for sure they were considering it, but we don't know what was actually said in that meeting because it was in person. We don't know if it was recorded or not. It was at the Starbucks corporate headquarters, and it featured a tasting of various types of coffee for Bob Ferguson before they told him, yeah, we're not doing anything you want. Now, they didn't offer the security for the stores, they're offering it for the corporate headquarters. Lars, for the people who don't know where the corporate headquarters is, it's south of the stadiums in Seattle, which is called Soto. That area has seen a lot of crime, but also a mass exodus of businesses. Whereas because so many people have been laid off in that area from some of the tech companies that are down there, you have less restaurants, you have less stores, and you have a lot of homeless people living in RVs down there. I mean, that's been going on for years. Behind Starbucks, Utah Avenue South, it used to be Seahawks Alley. That's where you go and you barbecue before the game, you tailgate, and that was filled with homeless people. And the last time I was down there actually checking it out was as of 2019. So this is something that's been going on for years. And yet nobody ever did anything about it until Starbucks says, hey, we're going to Nashville.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Yeah, and by the way, clearly didn't do enough. Last week, Ari, I was talking to the mayor of Federal Way. He's a former King County uh prosecuting attorney, and I said he got out just in time, but now he's the mayor in Federal Way. He points out that a lot of these problems are relatively easily solved. They managed to cut their car theft rate by 80 percent, their armed robbery rate by 70 percent, and their burglary rate by 60 percent, just by changing the way that they handled those kinds of crimes, the way the police and the prosecutor and the judges handle it. All of this is well within the reach of Seattle, or, you know, you could extend the same logic to Portland, but they could have done things like that. Ferguson clearly isn't isn't pushing for any of that change either.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Well, think about this. We just had the World Cup. And the World Cup went off without a hitch. I mean, when the Trump administration was talking about how successful it was, we didn't have any incidents down near the stadiums here in Seattle. And if you can keep them clear just for the World Cup, you can do it the rest of the year too. It just takes the will to actually do so. It takes the will to bring in federal partners when you're short on staff. You ask them for help, but nobody around here will do it. So now you see Seattle starting to revert to what it was before the World Cup. And as I told my audience at the time, I said, enjoy these six weeks because as soon as it's over, it's gonna come back with a vengeance. And that's exactly what we see happening. I was driving to the studio today, and I saw a lot of the notorious homeless encampments popping back up in South Seattle and along my drive, because now the World Cup's over.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

So the only time that the public officials, like the governor, like the mayor, Katie Wilson, uh uh care about cleaning up the city is when the World Cup comes, and that one is just, you know, a few hundred thousand citizens, she doesn't seem to care.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Yeah, and this seems to be apolitical because the last mayor, who is an actual Democrat as opposed to this one, who's a socialist, when the Major League Baseball All-Star game came to town, they cleared out for that. When Taylor Swift came to town, they cleared up for that one, and they do it for the World Cup. Apparently they just don't care the rest of the year.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

No, and that's really sad. That is the guy who follows me on our Seattle station, Ari Hoffman, host of the Ari Hoffman Show. He got the documents from that meeting that describe some of the things that Governor Bob Ferguson in Washington was considering doing, sending in the Washington State Patrol to try to persuade Starbucks, we'll clean up the neighborhood right around your headquarters. We're not going to do much about the rest of the problem for the rest of the city. They didn't manage to do it successfully. And now, as Ari said, Starbucks has left officially. They're still in Seattle unofficially, they've moved to Tennessee. Back in a moment, you've got the Lars Larson show.