By Erica C. Barnett

If you weren’t able to make it out to our live Seattle City Council Position 8 debate at Town Hall on Tuesday, don’t worry—you can listen to an edited version of that debate (minus the part where I did an impression of the Seattle City Council and yelled, ‘Police!!’ when people started getting rowdy) on this week’s Seattle Nice podcast.

For more than an hour an hour, appointed incumbent Tanya Woo and challenger Alexis Mercedes Rinck battled it out over the most important local issues, including taxes, homelessness, police recruitment, and density.

Asked about her approach to homelessness, Woo said she supported Mayor Bruce Harrell’s encampment removal policy, in which an advance team of city workers tells people living in encampments about available shelter beds prior to a sweep, because it “involves sending out outreach workers to make contact and offer shelter to every single person.”

Rinck, who previously worked as a subregional planner for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, said she preferred a strategy the state Department of Transportation has been using for encampments on state right-of-way, which involves longer-term, intensive outreach and placement in stable shelter and housing. “We actually found that 73 percent of folks who went through that program remained housed a year later,” Rinck said.

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While Rinck said she would support a local capital gains tax to raise revenue instead of raiding funds from the JumpStart payroll tax, Woo said that if progressive taxes were possible, “it would have been done”; she argued that the mayor’s budget plan, which uses $287 million in payroll tax funding to backfill a general-fund deficit, is “not different than what we have been doing in previous years,” when the council adopted law allowing future councils to use a limited amount of revenues this way.

Neither candidate really answered a question about the city’s practice of vastly over-funding the police department by paying for vacant “ghost” positions—so called because they are not inhabited by human bodies, and will not, according to SPD’s own projections, be filled during this budget year. SPD argues that they need this extra spending authority to pay for overtime and unexpected costs during the year.

Woo said police were “demoralized” during the “defund the police” movement so it’s important to “hold positions” for people to apply now that the political atmosphere has shifted; she also said, incorrectly, that the police have been impacted by a citywide hiring freeze. (Police, fire, and the 911 department were all exempt from the freeze.) Rinck said she wanted to get the response times for the highest-priority calls down to seven minutes, while scaling up other types of emergency response like behavioral health crisis response teams.

We also got into congestion pricing, drug policy, tree protections, and much more. If you’re unsure who to vote for in this race, or just want to learn more about the candidates, this debate—moderated by me, David Hyde, and Sandeep Kaushik—is a great place to start.