Seattle, WA
WNBA Seattle Storm’s CFO says ticket sales more than doubled despite inflation

A couple of hours earlier than the Seattle Storm and the Las Vegas Aces took to the court docket for Recreation 2 of the WNBA semifinals yesterday, I had a dialog with Tricia McLean, CFO of Seattle Storm and Power 10 Hoops LLC, the staff’s possession group.
“There are quite a lot of hats you put on as CFO,” McLean advised me throughout a video name. Like amenities administration, she says. “So proper now, I’m touring with the staff as a result of we’re within the playoffs. I don’t normally. However there’s quite a lot of reconciliation of the sport day statements. And income additionally is available in, which must be reported to the league.”
Whereas on the street, McLean is dealing with funds and rooting for the staff. She confirmed me the necklace she wears with the Storms’ WBNA championship rings. “I’ve three out of 4,” she explains. “After we received the championship in 2002, I wasn’t but with the staff. I put on these for good luck through the playoffs.”
Courtesy of Seattle Storm
McLean joined the Storm in 2008 as VP of finance and HR. She was promoted to CFO in 2019. Since becoming a member of the staff, she’s seen the enterprise develop. “We’ve grown over 250% this yr in income from our high quantity since I’ve been right here,” she says. “We’ve got 35 full-time, year-round staff. Then we’ve the 12 gamers. After which, we go as much as about 100 folks through the season for all our recreation nights. That features our dance troupe, IT folks, and others.”
She says that ticket gross sales, company partnerships and merchandise are the three predominant income streams. “We actually turned to on-line gross sales through the pandemic,” she says. “We used to promote about $150,000 price of merchandise a yr, which then was half one million {dollars} price of merchandise. We’ve saved our on-line gross sales as a result of we’ve so many extra followers. We’ll do over one million {dollars} in merchandise income this yr. And that’s because of the recognition of ladies’s sports activities and the WNBA specifically.”
“After which we’ve some TV income from ESPN,” she says. “And that’s by the league. That’s the recreation changer that we’re actually on the lookout for—to be paid for tv broadcasts.”
The Storm didn’t have a everlasting house for 3 seasons whereas the Local weather Pledge Area was beneath building. The staff had its season opener in Could on the area. “This yr, after we re-entered our house in Seattle, we greater than doubled our ticket gross sales,” McLean says.
As a CFO, I requested McLean if inflationary stress was certainly one of her high considerations. “I assume I’d be involved if folks give up spending their {dollars} on leisure,” she says. “However that has not confirmed to be the case for us in any respect. We’ve got nice renewal. The followers are there as a result of they care about our staff and the [win]. When the pandemic occurred, 90% of our season ticket holders left their cash with the Storm; they didn’t ask for a refund.” The Storm and the league “have nice momentum proper now,” she says. “And if we are able to get TV to be the place we’d like it to be, that would be the subsequent stage of development I’m on the lookout for.”
Evidently being a CFO within the WNBA is a tricky job. The league makes quite a lot of tough selections as a result of budgets are tight in comparison with different skilled sports activities. I requested McLean how she’s navigated this dynamic.
“It may be onerous,” she explains. “The athletes need sure issues, deserve sure issues that we are able to’t at all times afford. However we’re owned by three girls. Two of them had been skilled athletes; one was a silver medalist. In order that they imagine on this mission and need to present for these gamers greater than anybody. We’re lastly making fairly good cash, and so they’re nonetheless persevering with to place it again into the staff.”
She continues, “They’re constructing a state-of-the-art follow facility proper now for our athletes, which I imagine would be the first within the nation constructed by girls and financed by girls for girls.”
See you tomorrow.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Upcoming occasion: In case you are a CFO within the Chicago space, be part of us at Sepia on September 22 for our CFO Collaborative in-depth dinner dialog. The subject of dialogue: The Finance Expertise Mannequin of the Future. I will probably be joined by Fortune CEO Alan Murray, Fortune Finance Editor Lee Clifford, and Clem Johnson, President, Crist|Kolder Associates. Click on right here for extra info and to use. Please be aware that attendance is complimentary and topic to approval.
Massive deal
KPMG LLP’s annual report, “Tax Reimagined 2022: Views from the C-suite,” finds that tax professionals are in a time of transformation attributable to tech developments and the complexity of the U.S. and international tax regulatory panorama. Though there’s some progress from final yr, 52% of C-suite executives aren’t leveraging tax information for situation planning round tax coverage adjustments. In 2022, 68% of executives aren’t leveraging tax information to align with ESG priorities; that is a rise from 55% in 2021. Accounting stays a central competency for tax professionals. Nonetheless, in 2022, C-suite executives ranked coding as essentially the most wanted ability, in response to the report. The survey additionally discovered that 83% of respondents agreed that their group sees extra girls candidates and hires as tax professionals than in earlier years. And 72% agreed their group sees extra candidates and hires from underrepresented teams than in earlier years. The findings are based mostly on a survey of 300 C-suite executives at organizations with $1 billion or extra in income.
Courtesy of KPMG
Going deeper
“Freelance, facet hustles, and gigs: Many extra Individuals have turn into impartial staff,” a McKinsey & Firm report, factors to “a seismic shift” in how Individuals work and help themselves. McKinsey’s American Alternative Survey discovered that 36% of employed respondents—equal to 58 million Individuals—establish as impartial staff. This proportion is up from McKinsey’s estimate of 27% in 2016.
Leaderboard
Dominik Asam was named CFO at SAP SE (NYSE: SAP), efficient March 7, 2023. As beforehand introduced, after 26 years with the corporate, Luka Mucic, at the moment CFO, is stepping down. He’ll stay an SAP SE Government Board member till March 31, 2023. Asam involves SAP from Airbus. He additionally beforehand labored at Infineon Applied sciences AG. Along with his new CFO position at SAP, Asam will turn into a member of the Government Board.
Amanda Blum was named CFO at Lynx Software program Applied sciences, a developer of open structure software program options. Blum was beforehand with Inexperienced Hills Software program, a supplier of embedded security and safety options, the place she served as the company controller. Previous to becoming a member of Inexperienced Hills, Blum held a number of senior monetary and accounting positions at Sientra, Inc., a publicly traded medical system firm. She is a licensed public accountant.
Overheard
“The present superbubble options an unprecedentedly harmful mixture of cross-asset overvaluation (with bonds, housing, and shares all critically overpriced and now quickly shedding momentum), commodity shock, and Fed hawkishness. Every cycle is totally different and distinctive—however each historic parallel means that the worst is but to come back.”
—Wall Avenue veteran Jeremy Grantham, the cofounder of Boston asset supervisor GMO, argued in a Wednesday analysis be aware that regardless of the inventory market’s struggles this yr, the economic system’s actual downturn hasn’t but come. Grantham is well-known for having predicted Japan’s asset value bubble within the Nineteen Eighties and the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s, Fortune reported.
That is the online model of CFO Day by day, a e-newsletter on the developments and people shaping company finance. Signal as much as get it delivered free to your inbox.

Seattle, WA
Critics say the movement to defund the police failed. But Austin and Seattle are seeing progress

After George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, protesters who swarmed the streets across the US shouted the refrain: “Defund the police.” An idea that was once viewed as radical – to redirect money from law enforcement to other city departments and social services – became a rallying cry overnight.
As a result of continued pressure, dozens of jurisdictions throughout the nation promised to reduce their police budgets. While most of them backtracked and increased law enforcement funding in the next year or two, several cities changed policies or added new public safety and homeless services departments.
Milwaukee is one city where leaders diverted money to social programs that had a lasting impact: funding from the police department went toward affordable housing and youth programming. After 2020 Seattle invested part of its police funding into participatory budgeting, a process in which the public votes on how to spend a portion of the city’s finances.
A few years later, inspired by calls for alternatives to policing from Black and brown organizers, Seattle leaders launched a third public safety department that responds to mental health crises. And Austin has increasingly invested more money in its homeless services since the city diverted millions of dollars from the 2021 police budget to go toward permanent supportive housing instead.
Political organizers the Guardian spoke to said the abolitionist dream of divesting from police and reinvesting in social services is a long journey full of valleys. Backlash followed the 2020 protests, and public sentiment toward the movement quickly shifted.
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 27% of respondents said greater attention to racial inequality in the US improved Black people’s lives, compared with 52% who said it would lead to positive changes in 2020. Though the success stories of the defund movement are not always clear, the groups behind it say they helped move the needle forward in sparking conversations about city priorities and reimagining what public safety looks like. They hope the Trump administration’s commitment to capital punishment and increasing law enforcement will inspire people to again envision alternatives to policing.
“If spending money on policing were an effective way to deter crime, then the United States would be the safest country on the planet that has ever existed and it is nowhere near that,” said Marcus Board, an associate professor of political science at Howard University. “Meanwhile, healthcare suffers, childcare suffers, elder care suffers, public spaces are going away.”
Instead of recognizing that people need a social safety net, he said, society punishes people for their hardships as if it’s the key to transformation. But the punishment also robs people of their agency.
“That’s a world that will constantly suffer unless people step up to do something,” Board said, “which is why it’s so important to remember the movement for Black lives”.
‘A politicizing moment’
In the spring of 2019, Devin Anderson was tabling on police reform in Metcalfe Park in Milwaukee when an older Black woman approached him. Anderson, the campaign and membership director of the non-profit African American Roundtable, showed her a pie chart that revealed that 46% of the city’s general fund went toward the police department. Shocked by the figure, the woman told Anderson that she wanted to see more money spent on opportunities for youth, as she feared that boredom would drive her grandson to get into trouble that summer.
“That is a politicizing moment. Even if people do believe in police and policing, they don’t think it should be getting that much money,” Anderson said. “On a larger scale, what does it mean as a society when close to 50% of the money we spend has to go to police and policing, and it can’t go to make real investments into things that people want to see?”
Anderson and his team compiled the information that they gathered from tabling and listening sessions and formulated a list of community desires, including more youth programming, affordable housing and violence prevention. And then on Juneteenth that year, the African American Roundtable, which focuses on providing political education to the public, launched the campaign LiberateMKE to try to convince city leaders to divest $25m from the Milwaukee police department (MPD) and reinvest it in social programs instead. The campaign organizers attended budget hearings, spoke with city leaders about the need for reduced police spending and sent out email campaigns in which they encouraged residents to put pressure on their elected officials to invest more in social services.
A few months later, the campaign was somewhat successful: in Milwaukee’s 2020 adopted budget, the city diverted some $1.27m from the MPD to go toward housing and community services, and to increase the hourly wages for a summer jobs for youth program. Some of the diverted money also went toward affordable quality housing and a non-police violence prevention program, in which local residents were trained to de-escalate conflicts that had a high likelihood of resulting in shootings in their neighborhoods. In the city’s 2021 adopted budget, there was also an approximately $2m reduction in police funding, which the city’s comptroller, Bill Christianson, said reflected a smaller number of police officers, and that Anderson sees as a legacy of the group’s advocacy work.
‘A night and day difference’
Austin’s promise to cut its police funding worked for some time. The 2021 police budget went from $434.5m to $292.9m and some of the funds were invested into housing, healthcare, family and mental health services. But city leaders reversed course and increased the police budget to $443m the following year.
However, the impact from calls to invest in social services remains. After 2020, $6.5m that was diverted from the police budget went toward housing and services for unhoused people. Renovations for Bungalows at Century Park, an apartment community for the chronically unhoused that opened up last year, were included in that budget.
The residents pay for their apartments with housing vouchers or payment assistance and are meant to stay in their units long term, possibly for five or 10 years, said the director of Austin’s homeless strategy office, David Gray.
“To go from that into a safe, secure room where you can store your stuff safely, where you can sleep peacefully, and where you can meet with a case manager on site or get healthcare on site or job training on site, it’s a night and day difference,” Gray said.
While demands to invest in housing and services existed before Floyd’s death, the calls to defund the police that followed helped push discussions forward. Budget trends in recent years show that city leaders have listened to the community’s request for greater attention to the homelessness crisis. In Austin’s most recent point-in-time count of unhoused people from January, volunteers and providers recorded 1,577 unsheltered and 1,661 sheltered people – the first time that the count showed more people sheltered than unsheltered.
In the past five years, the city’s homelessness services appropriations have increased from $39.7m in 2020 to a proposed $118.1m in 2025. According to the city’s financial services data from 2024, the proportion of funding for homeless services that comes from the city’s operating budget has increased, from 49.7% in the 2023 fiscal year to 57.5% in the 2025 fiscal year.
“In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests this summer, we made a significant cut to policing dollars and reinvested that in things like this,” Austin city councilmember Gregorio Casar told the Appeal in 2021. “That’s the only reason we’re able to do this.”
Help outside of the police
Black and brown-led groups such as the policy organizing non-profit King County Equity Now and the Decriminalize Seattle coalition called on Seattle officials to establish a non-police crisis response unit. They presented the Seattle city council with a blueprint on how to divest from the police and reallocate funding to alternatives to law enforcement.
Organizers also called for a participatory budgeting process, in which the public would envision how to spend some of the city’s budget. And Seattle leaders listened to some of their demands: some $10.2m was diverted from the city’s police department to fund the participatory budgeting process’s overall $28.3m reserve in Seattle’s 2021 adopted budget.
Representatives from Seattle’s office of civil rights said that the funding from the police department came from unfulfilled positions and that the money would have returned to the city’s general fund if it were unused.
City leaders also looked to cities such as Eugene, Oregon, that had successfully launched non-police crisis response units to envision a third public safety department for Seattle. Launched in 2023, Seattle’s community-assisted response and engagement (Care) department is a 30-person unit consisting of 24 first responders who address calls throughout the city. Care operates 10 hours a day from noon until 10pm, with the top priority calls being for suicides and overdoses. In the last 16 months, Care has responded to more than 4,000 calls. The Seattle 911 dispatch was also transferred from the Seattle police department to the Care department.
When Care’s chief, Amy Barden, speaks to community members who have used the service, she said they relay to her that “it’s just a relief to feel like I can call 911, and get a different response” outside of the police. She knows that some health and social service providers avoid calling the police when their clients are experiencing mental health crises.
“They just don’t think it’s going to be useful in the circumstance, and that it can be stress inducing, no matter how skilled that officer is,” Barden said. “So it’s been a very popular movement across the board.”
Still, Barden views Care, police and the fire departments as working together as a team, and added that she “will not support divestment in the fire or police departments”, she said. “Relative to the 911 data, we desperately need more of everything.”
In 2024, participants in the participatory budgeting process – originating from the Black Lives Matter movement – voted to fund the Care department with an additional $2m to increase the number of the team’s behavioral and mental health specialists.
The organizers that helped push the city to create a third department say that Seattle can serve as an example for the rest of the nation. “It showcases the stronger need for us to always have these kinds of approaches to our work, particularly when we’re talking about doing work that’s supposed to benefit specific folks,” TraeAnna Holiday, the former media director of King County Equity Now, said. “It’s important for folks to be engaged and for them to have a vehicle that allows them to be involved when so many people are focused on survival.”
‘The movements are happening’
The protesters who took to the streets in opposition to law enforcement violence in 2020 were a catalyst for action, but the movement was ultimately led by organizers who worked for years to create safer and healthier communities.
The defund movement was sometimes demonized because there wasn’t a unified talking point on what communities would invest in outside of policing, said Hiram Rivera, the executive director of the Community Resource Hub for Safety & Accountability, a non-profit that trains communities on the basics of organizing.
During the mass protests, Rivera said: “Traditional organizing wasn’t happening at the community level; they weren’t able to build strong enough campaigns to either win the divestments or to be able to withstand the blowback when the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.”
Currently, Rivera said that the abolitionist movement is in a state of reflection on the past five years and assessing what they have the capacity to build, particularly given the federal attacks on non-profit organizations.
Rivera said that state bills have also made it challenging to divert funding from police departments since 2020. In May 2021, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, signed a law penalizing cities for defunding their police budgets. And in Milwaukee, the African American Roundtable plans to end its LiberateMKE campaign over the next year due to an increasingly inhospitable landscape for defunding the police, Anderson said.
A 2023 state funding law called Act 12 allowed Milwaukee to implement a 2% sales tax and jurisdictions are provided with additional state aid for law enforcement and fire protection, among other departments. But the city will lose part of its state funding if it does not maintain its number of police officers at the same amount as the previous year.
In light of the Trump administration’s recent executive order on “strengthening and unleashing America’s law enforcement”, the Advancement Project’s deputy executive director, Carmen Daugherty, said she is hopeful that the public will demand community-based solutions. A 26-year-old civil rights organization that focuses on movement lawyering, the Advancement Project has helped grassroots groups pressure their cities to invest more in social services by analyzing city budgets, creating surveys and white papers, and launching campaigns.
“This administration is saying we need more policing, more military grade-style weapons in our communities to make us safe,” Daugherty said. “Once again, we’ll hopefully see that upswing and recognition in the spotlight on what these community groups have been saying since pre-2020, but really galvanized in 2020, that there’s more we can do. There’s smarter solutions to public safety.”
For organizers in the Black-led Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) coalition, they seek to dispel what they consider a false narrative that the rallying call around invest-divest didn’t work. The defund movement helped catapult the model from the advocacy space into the national dialogue, said M4BL’s interim senior director of communications, Chelsea Fuller. Every day for the past five years, she said an article about defunding has been published, or a politician has debated its merits.
“These types of changes in our communities very rarely happen overnight,” Fuller said. Movements take several years, or decades to accomplish significant change. “It’s not over. Five years in the legacy of movement work and liberatory work is a blip on the radar.”
Seattle, WA
Seattle weather: Memorial Day weekend will be mostly sunny

SEATTLE – The Pacific Northwest will see beautiful weather for the Memorial Day weekend, with mostly sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s.

Friday will be a lot like Thursday with a nice mix of clouds and sunshine and high temperatures in the mid to upper 60s.

A ridge of high pressure will build over the area this Memorial Day weekend. Saturday and Sunday, Western Washington will see mostly sunny skies and highs into the mid 70s.

A very weak system will bring more clouds on Monday and the chance for a few light showers, especially on the northern Washington Coast.
What’s next:
Tuesday and Wednesday, temperatures will start heating up again. Wednesday could be our warmest day of the year so far with highs close to 80 degrees.

The next chance for rain showers arrives Thursday.
The Source: Information in this story came from FOX 13 Chief Meteorologist Brian MacMillan.
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Seattle, WA
Seattle Seahawks roster ‘still needs upgrade’ at two positions

The Seattle Seahawks did an excellent job during the 2025 NFL draft, especially with their first three selections. In Round 1, they added North Dakota State guard Grey Zabel, who should be a starter right away. They also brought in safety Nick Emmanwori and tight end Elijah Arroyo, who will also have key roles quickly.
Emmanwori is a star in the making who exploded at the NFL Combine. He’s expected to give them their new enforcer in the secondary, and is said to be a perfect fit for Mike Macdonald’s defense. Arroyo is a pass-catching tight end who will help them move on from Noah Fant.
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Those additions leave them with limited holes on the roster, but that doesn’t mean there are none. In fact, two of their top needs, according to Bleacher Report’s Alex Ballentine, are still on the offensive line.
“However, they still need an upgrade at center and right guard. They didn’t go all-in on offensive linemen and gave Darnold another weapon in Elijah Arroyo and drafted a developmental quarterback in Jalen Milroe.” — Ballentine, Bleacher Report
Seattle is set to start Olu Oluwatimi at center and either Anthony Bradford or Christian Haynes at guard. Neither is considered an elite player, with Bradford being ranked No. 72 out of 77 at guard by Pro Football Focus. Haynes didn’t play enough to get ranked, but the 2024 third-round pick left a lot to be desired.
That said, it’s unlikely the Seahawks do anything more at this point other than bank on improvement from their young linemen.
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