By Erica C. Barnett
The city council is about to choose a new council member to fill Tammy Morales‘ old District 2 seat, after narrowing down the field of 20 qualified candidates to six men.
After a chaotic public forum that focused primarily on how much the applicants seat support cops, cars, and keeping Sound Transit out of Chinatown, Seattle residents got one last chance to hear from the applicants on Thursday, when each finalist delivered a prepared 3-minute speech and answered questions from all eight current council members.
But if viewers were hoping to learn more about how each of the candidates would handle the primary responsibilities that will face them over the next nine and a half months—updating the city’s comprehensive plan, overseeing the council’s land use committee, addressing ongoing budget shortfalls amid the likelihood of federal funding cuts—the council often undercut that goal. Rob Saka went on forever. Dan Strauss asked everyone where they went to middle school. Joy Hollingsworth asked, “What about the children?” And Cathy Moore requested commitments to revisit the tree code to place more restrictions on tree removal to prevent density in single-family areas.
Each council member had ten minutes to address the finalists, and most of them gave each applicant at least a minute or so for a short answer to each question. The exception was Saka, who spent more than six minutes winding up to a confusingly worded yes or no question (basically: would the candidates run for election or be a “caretaker”)? and took several more minutes to ask a second question about the comprehensive plan. As a result, the six men had just two minutes, altogether, to explain their priorities and goals for the city’s comprehensive plan, a complex land use document that governs how and where the city will grow over the next 20 years. As Saka’s time wound down, two of his colleagues could be heard, on the Seattle Channel live stream, snickering and saying “oh my god,” respectively, and council president Sara Nelson gave them a few extra minutes so they could all say a few words.
For the record: Chukundi Salisbury and Mark Solomon, who have both previously said they would not run for election, were the only two who raised their green check mark cards.
Two quick notes: As in the public forum last Tuesday, many of the applicants’ answers were about issues or proposals the council has little or no control over, like specific Seattle Department of Transportation projects or how police officers should be deployed. To me, this suggests a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of what the council does, which has sometimes been a problem with the current council (see, for example, Saka’s frustration that he can’t just order SDOT to remove a curb that prevented him from turning left into a parking lot.)
Second, the new council member will chair the land use committee, so they ideally should have some land-use expertise; while experience as a neighborhood advocate is useful for a district council member, they’ll also be making decisions on technical issues that impact the whole city.
Finally, the fact that all six finalists are men is noteworthy, perhaps especially so because some of Morales’ colleagues and detractors dismissed her stated reasons for resigning—feeling bullied, gaslit, and excluded from important conversations—by suggesting she just wasn’t “tough” enough for the job, a common criticism of women who complain about workplace mistreatment. In modern history, there has never been another all-male panel of finalists for an open council seat.
Hong Chhuor
Nominated by: Sara Nelson
Chhour, the Chief Development and Communications Officer at Friends of the Children and co-owner of King Donuts, emphasized his ties to the immigrant and Asian American/Pacific Islander community and his commitment to improving public safety in Little Saigon. Like finalists Mark Solomon, Adonis Ducksworth, and Eddie Lin, Chhuor said his top priority on the would be to “address the travesty that is occurring at 12th and Jackson in Little Saigon.”
Quote: In response to a question from Dan Strauss about how he would “approach the dichotomy of our city need for housing and density with neighbors’ concerns that they don’t want their neighborhoods to change,” Chhour said: “I want to ask, why do we limit ourselves to that dichotomy? Could we take a moment to consider that the narrative around changing the character of our neighborhoods is a form of gatekeeping, and are we really a society in this city that wants to default to, ‘I got here first, and therefore I get to make the rules’?”
Adonis Ducksworth
Nominated by: Dan Strauss
Ducksworth, a Seattle Department of Transportation employee since 2016 (and transportation policy advisor to Mayor Bruce Harrell since 2023), talked about his experience volunteering with recovery-based groups like the Union Gospel Mission and his efforts to get a skate park in Rainier Beach, which he identified as one of his top priorities.
Quote: In his introductory comments, he said there were “five things I will be prioritizing for the district over the next 10 months, and these are things that I know can be done. Number one, address the state of emergency in the CID and Little Saigon. Number two, make Rainier Avenue safer. Number three, adopt a resolution that outlines a framework for how the city should be engaging with the community. Number four, host SPD recruiting and outreach fairs in every District Two, neighborhood. And number five, we need to give kids a different path. That’s why I want to break ground on the Rainier Beach skate park this year.”
Mark Solomon
Nominated by: Maritza Rivera
Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for the Seattle Police Department since 1990, said he would prioritize building generational wealth by promoting Black homeownership and keeping Black homeowners in their houses, noting that he can only afford to live in the city because he lives in the house his grandparents built. He also said he’s prioritize traffic safety in Southeast Seattle and building more sidewalks.
Quote: In response to a question from Rinck about what the city should to do respond to federal retaliation, such as the withdrawal of funds, against sanctuary cities like Seattle, Solomon said, “Just looking at the executive orders that have flown out of the past couple days does give me pause, and it made me think—’Okay, if you’re going to deny us money because we’re a sanctuary city, I’m going to go find my own money? I’m going to go find different sorts of funds, so I don’t have to rely on you.’ That’s one of the reasons I’ve been advocating for us to explore a public bank…. where we can set this up to borrow against our own assets to fund our own projects, so we don’t have to rely on the feds for [that] funding.”
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Chukundi Salisbury
Nominated by: Rob Saka
Salisbury, a longtime Seattle Parks Department employee and founder of the group Black Legacy Homeowners, touted his volunteer experience and emphasized his long history in Seattle. (His mother, former Community Police Commission co-chair Harriet Walden, spoke in his favor during public comment). In response to the sanctuary city question, Salisbury said he would look at “leaning in to private industry, not just taxing them, but asking them to really protect us as a sanctuary city.”
Quote: “My number one priority … would be strengthening the anti-displacement framework in the comp plan. We know that if we do not strengthen this anti-displacement framework, 20 years from now, there will not be a Black community, and many of our other BIPOC neighbors and the like who are most at risk for displacement will not exist here. And so this is one of the most important things to me. We got to be here to even work on these things.
Thaddeus Gregory
Nominated by: Joy Hollingsworth
Gregory, a land use attorney the son of Municipal Court Judge Willie Gregory, came across as the candidate with the most direct knowledge about land use. He also ticked several urbanist boxes—supporting safe bike infrastructure, supporting neighborhood corner stores (which are currently illegal), and revisiting minimum parking requirements, which can dramatically increase the cost of new housing.
Quote: In response to Moore’s litmus-test question about trees, Gregory responded: “Our tree code works to a certain extent, but sometimes more flexibility needs to be allowed. When that flexibility is there, we need to make sure that, as we develop, if any trees are taken away, we replant—twofold, threefold, fourfold. We have a goal of having a 30 percent tree canopy. It’s something that I think Seattle should absolutely aspire to and achieve. We can do it using the comprehensive plan, using the tree code. I think that we should revisit the tree code examine how we can both incentivise development and to use new development to spur more trees in our communities.”
Edward Lin
Nominated by: Alexis Mercedes Rinck
Lin, an assistant city attorney who previously worked as a private-sector land use attorney, emphasized the need to accommodate growth while preventing displacement through programs like the Equitable Development Initiative and “gentle density—duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, where somebody can age in place, and we can really build wealth within the community and not just have it go to outsiders.”
Quote: “Our schools are struggling, and educational inequality in Seattle is some of the worst in the nation. And what I’ve realized is a lot of things that happen outside our communities, whether it’s housing and homelessness or gun violence, those have huge impacts in our schools. And the [Families and Education] levy, things like kindergarten readiness, wraparound services, providing food and summer programs—those are huge ways that we can make a real difference in D2. … I’d love to lean into things like high school internships and, connecting our youth to the enormous wealth and job opportunities in our region, whether that’s the trades or tech companies or maritime industries or police.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote to Lin. We’ve replaced the quote with something Lin actually said, and we regret the error.
Thank you for your reporting! Hong Chhuor’s name is misspelled in the first few refs and should be “Chhuor” not “Cchuor.” Thank you! https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/Clerk/CouncilVacancy/2025-01/Applications/Chhuor-Hong.pdf
Thank you! Will fix right now.
One of the issues in Seattle city politics is that elected, candidates and voters don’t understand the roles. National news, TV shows, and other cities define roles for the council, mayor, and especially the city attorney. By both Seattle “right” and “left” fall for it.
The current mayor and council members think their primary jobs are to micromanage houseless people’s lives and the pet peeves of constituents, donors, or themselves. And so do voters. It’s to budget and direct city agencies to improve the lives of everyone. We can’t have nice things, like clean public bathrooms* because the wrong people might use them or they won’t have 360 services for them.
City Atty is not the felony prosecutor, that’s King County Prosecutor**. CA will have little impact on crime or incarceration but last campaign both final candidates ran on those. The main role is atty for the city on civil and regulatory cases. Progressives should be most concerned that Republican Davison is walking back cases against businesses; settling with bad cops but not citizens harmed by city actions.
*Everyone watch the movie Perfect Days. Public toilets aren’t the point of the movie, but you’ll be jealous of Tokyo’s.
**Why don’t progressive candidates run for KCP?
Could we take a moment to consider that the narrative around changing the character of our neighborhoods is a form of gatekeeping, and are we really a society in this city that wants to default to, ‘I got here first, and therefore I get to make the rules’?” says it all. And I think the answer is “no” in the short term. “I got mine, F U” is the boomer mantra so until they go (per Planck’s word on progress), not much will change. 30 years from now Seattle might be welcoming to all.
“Gatekeeping” does indeed sound abhorrent. Here is another framing: People of modest means invested everything they had at the time in addition to 30-40 years of investment in city infrastructure through property taxes; they did this based on the understanding that their neighborhoods were not urbanized downtowns, but neighborhoods with single houses and yards.
They are now being hectored with great moral righteousness that they must give up what makes their neighborhood livable and pleasing up for people who have just moved here or are not here yet. The average length of an Amazon worker’s time on the job is 1.5 years. There are exceptions: renters who stay on their job for a long time and who live in the city for a long time. There are also homeowners who move. But I would ask you to really think about the moral reasoning behind the idea that homeowners “should“ fundamentally change the things they love about their neighborhoods that they have invested in for people who are not here yet and those recently arrived who have not paid a dime into the infrastructure of the city.
I do not know any people in single-family neighborhoods who object to modest, height-compatible gentle density, i.e. the already legal backyard ADU or DADU or duplexes. That could be actual affordable housing. Due to how everything has been manipulated to benefit the builders’ and REIT free market interests, those “backyard cottages” have morphed into ADU and DADU’s in many neighborhoods as large as 2,000 square feet ranging from $1.5 million and going down to “only” $800,000.
We are not getting affordable housing. We are paving over the green that makes Seattle sustainably temperate and gives it its reputation as the Emerald City. We are fundamentally remaking the character of a city in a few decades, erasing historic neighborhoods with character and sense of place, adding monolithic apartment blocks and townhouses, displacing the disabled, the elders and the low income, and calling that “social justice.” I think we should listen to the people who own their homes with a lot of respect and consider what the moral standing is of newcomers to tell them “everything must change because we want to live where you do.” This has more than a whiff of garden variety colonialism.
“hose “backyard cottages” have morphed into ADU and DADU’s in many neighborhoods as large as 2,000 square feet”
No, they haven’t. It’s illegal. ADUs and DADUs are capped ay 1,000 square feet/