By Erica C. Barnett

The new Seattle City Council took the dais for the first time yesterday and, in an overheated council chambers packed from wall to wall with hundreds of maskless people, took their oaths of office, delivered modified versions of their campaign speeches, and officially received their new committee assignments. (The longest speech, for the record, was Dan Strauss’; the shortest, Maritza Rivera’s).

As PubliCola reported last month, Rob Saka (District 1, West Seattle) will be in charge of the transportation committee; Tammy Morales (District 2, South Seattle) will head the land use committee; Strauss (D-6, Northwest Seattle) will be in charge of the Finance, Native Communities, and Tribal Governments committee;  Bob Kettle (District 7, Downtown, Queen Anne) will head up public safety; and citywide council member Sara Nelson will be the new council president (she’ll also chair the new the Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development committee).

In addition, Joy Hollingsworth (D-3, Central Seattle) will chair the Parks, Public Utilities, and Technology committee, Rivera (D-4, Northeast Seattle) will chair Libraries, Education and Neighborhoods, Cathy Moore (D-5, North Seattle) will head up Housing and Human Services. The names and focus of committees shift every couple of years based on council members’ interests; notably, there is no longer a dedicated committee for renters’ rights or homelessness (previously chaired by Kshama Sawant and Andrew Lewis, respectively).

The Sustainability, City Light, and Arts and Culture committee will be chaired by whoever the council appoints to replace Teresa Mosqueda, who just won election to the King County Council.

Returning council members refrained from rolling their eyes too visibly when all five of their new colleagues suggested that their elections would usher in a new era of good feelings on a previously divisive council and solve previously intractable problems through the power of “unity” and “collaboration” with each other and Mayor Bruce Harrell, who supported most of the newly elected members’ campaigns and held a press conference to “welcome” all five of them at his office in December.

This frequent refrain seemed to imply not just that the new council would get along better than the old one now that six former members are leaving, but that they will agree on more policy issues, which may be true—but ideological agreement probably won’t be enough to close a $250 million budget gap when every dollar, from police to human services, has a vocal constituency.

Moore said that when she was on the campaign trail, “I found people hungering for connection, normalcy, and order” amid the chaos of the COVID, homelessness, and fentanyl crises; she said she expected the new council to serve as “a lifeline out of this bewildering and battering storm that our city has endured these past four years.”

Saka said he decided to run for council to for the same reason he enlisted in the Air Force “when the smoke was still billowing from the ashes of the Twin Towers”—a desire to promote a “spirit of resilience and unity.” The new council, he added, had a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the culture” at city hall.

And Hollingsworth, a former college basketball player, told a story about a coach who made her her practice pivots, saying that tedious exercise taught her the importance of prioritizing the fundamentals—”functionality, not politics.”

The council’s first order of business will be appointing a replacement for Mosqueda, which they have until January 22 to do. Of the people who have reportedly (or openly) expressed an interest in the position, at least two—former Morales opponents Mark Solomon (who ran against her for an open seat in 2019) and Tanya Woo (who lost to her last year) were in the audience; another potential contender include Seattle School Board member Vivian Song Maritz and Juan Cotto, a neighborhood activist from South Seattle who works as government affairs director for Bloodworks Northwest.