For three years, the Central District property has been at the center of a heated legal battle that has pitted different generations of Seattle’s Black firefighters against each other.
For three years, the Central District property has been at the center of a heated legal battle that has pitted different generations of Seattle’s Black firefighters against each other.
Clarence Williams remembers the Seattle Black Firefighters Association home in the Central District as more than just a place for tired members to rest their head between shifts.
The retired firefighter recalls the house at the corner of 23rd Avenue and East Pike Street serving as a bastion of community organizing and workplace advocacy. Neighbors stopped by to register to vote. Young recruits studied for tests there. Local organizations and churches used it for meetings and Sunday school. The home has even been used to host wakes for deceased members.
“It had a lot of sentimental value,” said Williams, who served as the organization’s second president from 1970 to 1980. “We got a lot of good usage, and that legacy has been ongoing.”
But the property’s role as a community hub is long in the past, said Drew Andrews, a member of the executive board. The home was neglected by members fordecades, suffering from a leaky roof that made the building uninsurable, moldy walls, failing windows, no heating and a flooded basement, he said. To Andrews, the home as it stood in recent years represented a dark period of financial troubles in the organization’s history.
“We didn’t have the money, we couldn’t take a loan out on it, we can’t refinance it because we couldn’t get it insured,” Andrews said. “It was like, we have this property that we’re just kind of stuck with.”
For three years, the property has been at the center of a heated legal battle that has pitted different generations of Seattle’s Black firefighters against each other. Tensions boiled over after its sale in October, and several local advocates have since publicly called for the sale to be overturned.
In a February 2022 lawsuit and a barrage of subsequent court filings, the association — a dues-paying membership group aimed at supporting Black firefighters and strengthening the pipeline of firefighters of color — has been accused of organizational secrecy, fraudulent elections and membership obstruction. Intense and ongoing concerns about gentrification in the Central District exacerbate the situation.
Members against the sale hope to overturn it in court, even as the home’s new owners have already begun renovating.
The two sides — the current executive board and mostly younger active firefighters versus past executives and mostly older retired firefighters — have vastly diverging perspectives.
Williams, along with the group of mostly retired firefighters and several community advocates, said the house is a symbol of the important work the association has done to pave the way for the city’s Black firefighters.
The loss of the property is emblematic of ongoing displacement of Black residents and Black cultural spaces in the Central District, said longtime community activist Eddie Rye Jr. In 1970, more than 73% of the neighborhood’s population was Black. Today, it’s roughly 16%.
Andrews and other current members of the organization’s executive board acknowledge the rich history of the property, but said repairing the house to be insurable would have been prohibitively expensive. After years of financial disorder, Andrews said selling the property was the association’s best option to right the ship.
Property in disrepair
The city’s Black firefighters founded the association in 1968 to fight against discrimination at work and to recruit more Black firefighters. Williams said he and a group of founding members bought the property in the 1970s to have a permanent home base as their advocacy continued expanding.
The association took out a loan against the property to help defend the promotion of Claude Harris — the department’s first Black firefighter and the group’s first president — to battalion chief under the city’s affirmative action program in court, Williams said. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1981 upheld the promotion, and Harris would go on to become the city’s first Black fire chief four years later.
“This property really helped us to secure that victory,” Williams said.
While the parties disagree on how often the property was used in recent decades and for what purpose, everyone agrees that by 2018, the house had fallen into disrepair.
At the time, the property was no longer insured and the organization began discussing the possibility of substantial repairs to restore coverage, Andrews said.
Andrews said members soon discovered the organization had never filed taxes with the Internal Revenue Service. In a deposition for the lawsuit over the sale, a former president alleged members also learned the organization was behind on property taxes and had failed to consistently record transactions. The former president also alleged in the deposition that a past board member admitted at the time to using the association’s bank account for personal use.
Yohannes Sium, an attorney representing the retired members and their allies, acknowledged the lack of IRS tax filings, but called other allegations of financial mismanagement untrue.
As knowledge of the financial concerns spread, a rift began to form between groups of retired and active firefighters, Andrews said. Some sought to tackle the financial disorder internallywith a compassionate hand. Others demanded an independent forensic audit and insisted the organization clean up its financial records.
“We were so far in the hole just trying to figure out how to pay years of taxes,” Andrews said.
There was major turnover in the executive board in 2019. The new governing board — made up largely of a newer generation of firefighters — tried to make sense of the organization’s finances while struggling with low morale, said current executive board member Juliana Edwards, who was appointed vice president at the time.
In 2021, the board formed a special committee to look into whether to keep or sell the house. Bids to repair the house went into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Edwards said. Utilities and property taxes on the home cost about $9,000 annually, Andrews said.
Concluding the organization didn’t have the financial resources necessary to repair the house, and recognizing most membership meetings had moved online during the pandemic, the board put the decision up to a vote during two special meetings in November 2021, according to Edwards. The members who participated in those meetings approved the sale, she said.
Dispute over sale
News of the sale launched a firestorm of backlash from retired members.
“It feels like your home that you live in every day, and all of a sudden someone had put a for sale sign up,” Williams said.
Williams and two other firefighters sued the association and its then-executive board in February 2022 to block the sale of the house. Sium, the attorney representing them, said members did not get proper notice of the vote, and that retired members should have been able to cast a ballot despite not paying dues.
In December 2023, King County Superior Court Judge Josephine Wiggs-Martin ruled no proper vote had occurred to sell the property. She also ruled that under the organization’s bylaws, retired firefighters should be considered members regardless of whether they pay dues.
Matthew Macklin, an attorney representing the association, said theruling was based on a lack of clarity in the organization’s bylaws, and that the organization is currently appealing the ruling.
Both sides saw the ruling as a victory. The association said the judgment found minor administrative oversights but did not bar the group from selling the property. Retired members and their supporters said the ruling confirmed they had a stake in determining the home’s future.
Conflict continued to brew. After months of discussion, the board put to a vote a bylaws amendment to clarifythat membership requires dues payment. Online ballots were sent to all members, retired and active, in July, Edwards said. The amendment passed with about 59% of the vote, according to the organization’s records.
Sium said, however, that some retired members did not know how to access their ballot online and alleged some did not receive one at all. Some votes sent by email were not counted, he alleged, adding he believes that had everyone been able to cast their vote, the bylaws change would have failed.
Under the new bylaws, voting eligibility requires retired members to pay dues, and back dues, Macklin said. As of early January, there are 54 active dues-paying members, Edwards said.
Williams emailed the executive board soon after the vote to criticize the required back dues, court recordsshow. He wrote that the retired firefighters would vote yes to sell the property if they would receive one half of the selling price or $300,000, whichever was greater.
“Because Retired Firefighters made the initial investment and that investment has increased in value over the last 40 years, we believe that Retired SBFFA Firefighters should be compensated for their investment if that investment is cashed in or is sold,” he wrote in a July 17 email.
The board did not entertain the proposal. The following month, the board sent 57 members a ballot to vote on whether to sell the house for a $760,000 cash offer or repair the home for a minimum of $90,000. About 83% of members voted to sell the house.
The organization ultimately sold the property to a different buyer, Unico Designs LLC, in October for $680,000. Unico Designs LLC is an interior design services company owned by real estate developer Camila Borges, who did not respond to requests for comment.
Sium alleged in court documents the property’s sale was illegal because the vote was not tied to the specific Unico Designs offer. Both elections fly in the face of the judge’s ruling, and both votes would have swung in his clients’ favor had all retired members been able to vote, he said.
Some retired members said they have tried paying dues through direct deposits into the organization’s bank account or sending money by certified mail, but the organization’s board is rejecting the money, Sium alleged in a declaration to the court. Macklin, the attorney defending the association, said the retired members haven’t followed procedures for invoicing their dues, making it unclear what money is for whom. Most are still behind on back dues, Macklin added.
In November and December, Sium filed several motions to the court in hopes of rescinding the sale.
“It’ll be three years now … since we filed (the initial lawsuit),” Sium told the judge during oral arguments last month. “We didn’t go through that whole thing just so they could wait until the judgment was finished and then violate it the same way.”
On Friday, Wiggs-Martin granted the motion for contempt, and said the association had sold the property “likely based upon contemptuous conduct in violation of the court’s findings.” Macklin said the association will appeal the decision, saying membership rights should not extend to people who don’t pay dues.
“Had the proper procedure been followed and had folks actually done what the court said to do, instead of doing their own thing that they wanted to do, we may not be here,” Wiggs-Martin said in court Friday.
Wiggs-Martin did not reverse the sale Friday, however, noting that whether she has the authority to do so remains to be determined. A hearing specifically on the request to reverse the sale is scheduled for Feb. 25.
What comes next
For decades, the Central District has been a major hub of racial justice activism. The Seattle Black Firefighters Association is part of that history, said Erwin Chappel, a battalion chief who has been with the department for 35 years.
The fight over the property is about safeguarding that legacy, said Chappel, who is amongthe members suing the association.
“It’s been a small few that are making decisions that affect the rest of the members,” he said. “We have a number of other active firefighters who are … disappointed that we are at the position that we are now.”
Andrews said he has deep respect for retired members. He recounted stories he heard about Harris, who spent years as the city’s only Black firefighter. Other firefighters refused to use the same spoons and forks as him. He was accused of stealing his uniform. “There would be no me if there wasn’t a Claude,” he said.
Friday’s ruling has left some current members discouraged, Macklin said. The ongoing dispute has been a painful experience, Andrews said, preventing the organization from moving forward and addressing other issues such as workplace discrimination experienced by current firefighters and the diverse recruitment of future firefighters. Today, just under 7% of the city Fire Department’s 1,060 employees are Black.
“Knowing how much it meant to the Black community in the Central District, I get it, I understand,” Andrews said of the outcry over the sale. “But we have to look at (the situation) and take responsibility and accountability for the organization as it is now.”
Construction has already begun on the property. On a recent Friday, a worker could be seen replacing an upstairs window. The home’s interior has been stripped to the studs, and the outside is covered in weather-resistant housewrap. The roof appears to be new.
The executive board has been considering how the organization will use profits from the sale, such as creating scholarships or offering members training opportunities, Edwards said.
But the retired members and their allies said the fight is far from over. With Friday’s ruling, all retired members will have their voting rights and meeting access restored. And if the judge’s ruling does not reverse the sale in a future ruling, Sium said, the group will file a new lawsuit in hopes of reclaiming the property.
The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.