By Erica C. Barnett

The appointment process for a vacancy on the Seattle City Council amounts to a accelerated version of a normal city council campaign, in which the electorate has been shrunk to just eight people—the members of the Seattle City Council. The campaign for the open citywide council seat recently vacated by Teresa Mosqueda has felt especially rushed, because the likely winner—Tanya Woo, who lost to Tammy Morales in the race for Council District 2 last year—was anointed before the window for applications had even closed.

If that sounds cynical, well, so is the effort by the business interests (and their longtime lobbyist ally Tim Ceis) to install Woo on the council immediately after voters elected someone else to represent them. Big businesses poured more than a million dollars into last year’s election, and  Woo was the only one of their candidates who lost. Those businesses want to even the score, and most of the council’s new centrist majority have indicated they’re happy to reverse a democratic process to secure a seven-vote supermajority.

This immovable fact has made the whole “campaign” process, including last week’s CityClub-hosted forum for the eight purported finalists, feel a bit like theater. But even an event that won’t change anyone’s mind (and which most council members didn’t bother attending in person) can reveal some things about the state of the city council in Seattle, as well as what the 2025 campaign for this position (which begins, approximately, now) will look like,

Most of the eight finalists—whose names were widely circulated long before the council plucked them from a list of 72 applicants—are people who either have never run for a local election before or who ran and lost to Tammy Morales; of the eight, only Seattle School Board member Vivian Song has been elected to any public office, and both Mark Solomon and Woo ran against Morales unsuccessfully.

That lack of direct experience was evident at last week’s forum. Many candidates struggled to answer basic questions about how the city operates, and retreated to pablum (how, and with what funding, will candidates “audit the budget so we know how the money is being spent,” “preserve generational BIPOC wealth,” or invent new ways of “measuring results”?) and anecdotes. Pointing to a kid in the audience, Bloodworks Northwest government affairs director Juan Cotto told a rambling story about a cancer researcher who responded to a child’s complex question with the “powerful” answer “I don’t know,” which happened to also be his response to a question about balancing the budget.

Here are some other moments that stood out during the forum, which served as Seattle residents’ only lengthy glimpse into the views, priorities, and preparedness of the eight council finalists.

• In response to a question about which neighborhoods in Seattle “should not be upzoned,” Mari Sugiyama, who oversees contracts in the Human Services Department’s Safe and Thriving Communities division, said that before allowing more housing in an area, “we have to think about families where that home might be their only form of generational wealth. And so if you’re upzoning in that area, and they are being pushed out, what sort of impact do you have for their generations to come?” Only Linh Thai, who works for a veterans’ nonprofit, was unambiguous: “Because this is a matter of equity, every neighborhood must upzone,” he said.

• Steve Strand, the captain of SPD’s West Precinct, gave a surprisingly pro-bike response to a question about road safety—the city, he said, should harden its bike infrastructure so riders are protected by physical barriers, not paint on pavement—then immediately backpedaled by saying he would pursue “enforcement” of helmet laws.  King County repealed its mandatory helmet law in 2022, shortly after SPD stopped enforcing it, citing data showing it disproportionately impacted homeless people and people unable to pay fines of up to $150 for helmet violations.

Unsurprisingly, while Strand joined many of his fellow candidates by saying the city should “audit the budget” and slash spending before raising taxes, he said there was one part of the budget that should be categorically exempt from cuts: Police, who he credited with improving public safety at the “hot spot” intersections of 12th and Jackson and Third and Pike.

• Responding to the same question about making roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists, both Cotto and Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator at SPD, offered personal anecdotes that suggested individual, rather than government, solutions. Cotto said people “drive too fast” and need to slow down, and Solomon said he was fed up with seeing pedestrians failing to pay attention to their surroundings. “It’s amazing how many times I see people walking down the street into traffic, looking at their phones. It’s like, don’t do that!” Solomon said.

Solomon also suggested the city could improve safety by “synchronizing all of our traffic signals, so that they things can flow better. “Synchronizing signals so that cars don’t have to stop or slow down may be more convenient for drivers, but it definitely doesn’t make cyclists or pedestrians safer; the faster a person is driving, the more likely they are to kill or injure anyone they hit.

• All eight candidates said they would support keeping or even expanding on the new funding for student mental health the council added in last year’s budget, although only Vivian Song seemed to fully grasp the premise of the question. In the wake of the Ingraham high school shooting, students lobbied the council to increase mental-health funding, and former council member Kshama Sawant sponsored a budget amendment to increase the JumpStart payroll tax to provide $20 million a year for student mental health care services.”I’m very excited that the city council recognizes this tremendous need in our community,” Song said, “…and I will make every effort to protect it.”

• Niha Nariya, the owner of the Civic Hotel, responded to a generic question about civic engagement with an out-of-touch anecdote about her nanny, who recently applied for US citizenship and had to take the 100-question naturalization test. “My son, who was four at the time, could not read but would always ask me to tell him the questions so he could ask our nanny at breakfast, and he knew most of the answers before she took her exam,” Nariya said. “And the funny thing is, he would go to school and ask those same questions again to his friends in the class. … Long story short, civic engagement starts with the youth and showing them that they can actually be empowered.”

• During a lightning round, every candidate except Song and Nariya said they would support “fixing problems” with the city’s new tree protection ordinance by making it harder to remove trees for development (Nariya held her yes/no paddle sideways and shrugged, seeming to indicate confusion). Nariya and Song both declined to answer a confusing question about the “Luma amendment,” which would increase the number of “heritage” trees that can’t be removed for development by a factor of 25, to more than 8,000. (All of the other candidates said they’d support it) The proposed amendment, named after Western red cedar on the site of a townhouse development in Wedgwood, would prevent new housing in large swathes of Seattle’s single-family neighborhoods.

• In another possible sign of confusion, all eight finalists said they would support a citywide inventory of rental housing, which would provide transparency into the opaque rental housing market. Legislation that would have created exactly this kind of inventory was the only bill Mayor Bruce Harrell vetoed during his first two years in office, so supporting a rental inventory would represent a direct rebuke to the mayor and his agenda—assuming that the finalists understood what they were committing to.

• One question—”Do you have a consistent history of voting on local matters as a private citizen?”—was pointedly aimed at Tanya Woo, the Chinatown/International District activist and presumptive appointee. Despite calling herself a “daughter of Seattle,” Woo has rarely bothered to vote in local elections. “I come from a community that does not vote,” Woo said, adding that she did not mean for this to be an excuse. “We are not talking about politics, we’re talking about survival.” Woo, who worked at KING 5 for a decade, and her husband, a hedge-fund manager, own assets valued between $3 million and $5.1 million, according to her financial disclosure documents.

“This past couple of years,” Woo continued, “I’ve been actively out there trying to register people who have never voted before, people who are in their 80s, 90s, refugees and immigrants, non-English speakers who have voted for the very first time in this past election”—the one in which she was on the ballot and had a direct interest in the outcome.

The council will hold a meeting Monday at 9:30 to take public comments about the appointment and ask the finalists questions for the first time in public before voting to select their new colleague at 2:00 the following day.