By Erica C. Barnett

Each of the eight current Seattle City Councilmembers nominated one person each to serve as the replacement for former councilmember Teresa Mosqueda on Friday, narrowing down the list of 72 candidates whose applications just became public yesterday to eight.

Most of them will be familiar names to anyone who has been reading this site. Council members went one by one starting with Bob Kettle (who ousted Andrew Lewis last year), so the nominations don’t necessarily reflect which candidate was each council member’s first pick. They are:

Tanya Woo, the Chinatown-International District activist who fought against the expansion of a homeless shelter in SoDo and narrowly lost her race against District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales in November. (Bob Kettle)

Linh Thai, a former staffer for Congressman Adam Smith who was most recently the head of a veterans’ service organization. (Joy Hollingsworth).

Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator with the Seattle Police Department who ran against Morales in 2019, when she was first elected to the council. (Rob Saka)

Juan Cotto, a a neighborhood activist from South Seattle who works as government affairs director for Bloodworks Northwest. (Maritza Rivera)

Mari Sugiyama, a Human Services Department manager who got a recent boost from a letter signed by 300 supporters, which I wrote about yesterday. (Tammy Morales).

Neha Nariya, the owner of the Civic Hotel in Queen Anne, which has served as emergency shelter (during the early days of the pandemic) and, more recently, as the site of harm reduction-based lodging through Purpose Dignity Action’s CoLEAD program. (Cathy Moore)

Steve Strand, the captain of SPD’s West Precinct. (Sara Nelson).

Vivian Song, a member of the Seattle School Board. (Dan Strauss).

If PubliCola was taking bets, the odds are on Woo, who several council members said would have been their first pick if they’d been at the front of the nominating line (Moore and Rivera, plus Saka, who mentioned her and a couple of people who didn’t make the cut). By installing Woo immediately after she lost an election, the council wouldn’t just be overturning the will of the voters, but requiring Morales to serve alongside the person she defeated—not a great look for a council that can’t stop talking about the new era of good feelings their election will usher in at city hall.

Beyond that, it’s unclear whether Woo—who received fewer than 13,000 votes in all, and whose support is strongly rooted in the CID—can win citywide, particularly in a Presidential election year when general electorate in Seattle will be younger and more progressive than in the low-turnout, non-mayoral odd-year election in which Woo narrowly lost. But apparently some on the council think she can; council president Sara Nelson, for example, said her “first criterion” for choosing a new colleague was that they must be “somebody who was going to run for office this year” and win.

“I would like the person that is in this seat to be the person who is going to have to live with those decisions that they make over the next nine months,” Nelson said. “The tendency to promise more than we can deliver long term is what I believe has gotten us into this position, and so I am very much looking for somebody who’s going to be willing to be accountable for the decisions that they make when they’re at this dais.” It’s not clear which council members she was referring to with that comment—of her colleagues that didn’t seek reelection last year, only one, Alex Pedersen, had served just one term before bowing out; the rest were veterans (Herbold, Juarez, Sawant) or ran and lost (Lewis).

Besides Nelson, most council members said the characteristics they were looking for in a new colleague were things like commitment to the city, community support, and expertise in at least one issue area—standard stuff. The only exception: Rob Saka, who said that after “collaboration,” his primary requirement is that they must be “someone who doesn’t view me as the enemy. Someone who doesn’t view any of my colleagues as the enemy either.”

“It’s unfortunate that that is something that have to have to say as something we should specifically avoid in this day and age,” Saka continued. “But that’s where we are. That’s a point where … we need to move move beyond that. So, let us move beyond the divisive, toxic, inappropriate rhetoric of ‘enemy.'” Noting that he is an Air Force veteran, Saka said he had spent time on combat missions “fighting against enemies. And what we’re doing [on the council] does not create or engender an enemy mindset or mentality.”

Saka did not specify who was trying to create an “enemy” mentality on the past or current council, or whether any of the 72 applicants had prompted this concern.

There was one more odd moment near the end of the meeting. It came during Nelson’s comments, which were initially about how she didn’t plan to nominate Strand, given that there were so many good candidates already. But, after describing Strand’s attributes—he has “partnered with multiple city departments, human service providers, businesses, and community based organizations to address homelessness, drug addiction, organized retail theft, [and] coordinated operations to target predatory drug dealers that fueled the fentanyl crisis”—she changed her mind, interrupting her own comments to say “You know what? I’ve convinced myself,” and nominate Strand after all.

Yesterday, Strand sent an email to all West Precinct staff that made it sound like he’d be going away for a while.

“I will leave my door open and light on for the next week and a half so you can come up and take a look” inside the office, the email—which, he insisted, was “not a going away speech”—said. “Outside the door you’ll see my Officer of the Year plaque from 1999. The handcuffs are Zsolt’s and were placed on all 326 arrestees we made that year.” Zsolt is Zsolt Dornay, a notorious officer who shot an unarmed DUI attorney in a brawl on Post Alley that may have started when he drove his motorcycle through a crowd, was suspended in 1995 for a violent road-rage incident, was suspended again for drunk driving in 2010, and was sued (and suspended) for allegedly assaulting a handcuffed man.

The email also encourages officers and staff to check out his military awards and gear, along with various other memorabilia, but warns “Don’t drink the snake wine, not sure what would happen.”