By Erica C. Barnett
City Councilmember Cathy Moore will resign her position on July 7 after representing North Seattle’s District 5 for a year and a half. PubliCola exclusively reported the news on Bluesky on Monday after confirming with multiple people familiar with Moore’s decision.
Moore did not respond to our request for comment. She gave an interview to KOMO, the station that produced the infamous civic snuff film “Seattle Is Dying.”
Although Moore cited unspecified health concerns in a late-afternoon press release, the sources we spoke to said Moore is fed up with the job, which involved listening to sometimes harsh public pushback from constituents who disagreed with her legislative priorities.
Most recently, Moore faced criticism of her proposal to amend the city’s ethics code to allow city council members to shape and vote on legislation that presents a financial conflict of interest. That opposition included not just chants and shouts from former councilmember Kshama Sawant and members of her organization, Workers Strike Back, but emails and public comments fromhundreds of individual Seattle residents who opposed the proposed rollback of the council’s ethical standards.
The legislation, which Moore withdrew last week, was widely seen as an effort to allow the council’s two landlords, Mark Solomon and Maritza Rivera, to vote on upcoming legislation, also from Moore, to roll back eviction protections passed by the previous council. Last week, Solomon told PubliCola he was a “no” vote on Moore’s legislation, after voting for the bill in committee.
Moore’s distaste for the kind of public pushback that’s part of the job she ran for was evident from the very start of her term. In February 2024, when the council was still busy patting itself on the back for their camaraderie and commitment to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “One Seattle Agenda,” Moore demanded that police arrest a group of demonstrators who were protesting outside council chambers, claiming they posed a “physical threat to the safety of each one of us. “Arrest those individuals,” Moore told police, adding that this kind of protest was “not to be tolerated.”
After that initial salvo, Moore would frequently object to the way people voiced their opposition to legislation, suggesting that it represented a new kind of incivility toward council members from a small segment of the public. In fact, Seattle has a long tradition of rowdy protest against council actions, going at least back to the Teen Dance Ordinance, when a dance-based protest led Margaret Pageler (the Cathy Moore of her day) to chase one of her constituents around the room at a public meeting.
Moore’s departure will almost certain mean the end of the road for her ethics rollback bill, which faced an uncertain future already.
It could also mean the end of her proposal to roll back eviction protections.
Moore’s legislation, according to sources familiar with its text, would have repealed the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums; overturned a law allowing tenants to add new roommates without prior approval; revised the process for landlords to file three-day eviction notices; and eliminated the requirement that landlords offer tenants the opportunity to renew their lease when it expired, among other rollbacks.
Moore passed little legislation during an impact during her brief time on council. Her biggest legislative achievement was passing a law that re-criminalized so-called “prostitution loitering” (targeting sex buyers instead of sex workers) and reinstated a “Stay Out of Prostitution Area” zone along the length of Aurora Avenue North. She also directed funding originally intended for groups that work with former sex workers on Aurora to The More We Love, a group started by a Kirkland real estate broker named Kristine Moreland that began as a for-profit company offering private encampment “sweeps” in Burien.
Moore was less successful in her efforts to revise the city’s comprehensive plan, the document that determines how much new housing can be built in Seattle and where, to make it harder to build apartments in her district and around the city. Moore attempted repeatedly to water down legislation to implement House Bill 1110, the bill that requires the city to allow at least four housing units on every residential lot—first suggesting that every privately constructed fourplex should have to include affordable housing, a proposal that would have ensured that no such housing got built, then proposing an amendment to require 20-foot yards in front of every new low-density development.
The comprehensive plan has been pushed into next year, and the bill to allow fourplexes passed without Moore’s amendment.
Moore also didn’t manage to amend the city’s tree code to make it harder for property owners to remove trees they own, a priority she brought up often during discussions about development.
Nor did she pass a capital gains tax as part of last year’s budget, or bring the idea up again in the six months since then.
She did manage to throw a wrench in plans to relocate Tent City 4, a sanctioned encampment, within her district; instead of staying a year at the Lake City Community Center as previously planned, Tent City 4 will have to move elsewhere within one to six months.
Once Moore leaves on July 7, the council will have 20 days to appoint a replacement—a process that has become familiar to this council, which previously appointed Tanya Woo to replace Teresa Mosqueda and Mark Solomon to replace Tammy Morales, who resigned after what she described as relentless bullying by her fellow council members at the beginning of 2025. Whoever gets the appointment will serve until November 2026, when there will be another election to determine who represents District 5.
Calling around on Monday about potential candidates, we learned that a number of previous contenders and progressive who live in the district are not interested in the job. One person who just might be, though, is Housing Development Consortium Patience Malaba—who gave a polite no comment when we asked if she was interested in running for the position.
I’m delighted to know she is leaving! So many reasons!
Be gone Cathy, before someone drops a house on you!
I wish someone could ferret out what’s the relationship between Moore and Moreland, since Moore certainly steered her and her unqualified “non-profit” a good deal of dollars in both Burien and Seattle.
Cathy Moore was my representative on the council and I am heartsick to hear about her departure. From what I am aware of, I read this as the stress of Seattle’s approach to its represent representatives taking its toll. I had hoped she could remain throughout her term. When it came to public safety Cathy was a relentless advocate for neighbors being terrorized on a nightly basis by the organized crime sex traffickers on Aurora. She listened, she responded, — she had common sense. It was such a refreshing change from the complete silence of her predecessor and the gaslighting common to almost everyone else on the city council and in the government we have here in Seattle.
She was the neighborhood’s greatest advocate when it came to protecting our tree canopy, and for sensible zoning that allows residents to have light, privacy and a level of low rise density that respects the character of our city. She saw through the propaganda and language disguise of “Urbanists” selling us deregulation and trickle down economics as “equity“ and “social justice“. She will be dearly missed. I hope someone will be chosen to replace her who has similar values. I have never felt so well represented by a council member in the city.
Publicola lists all the legislation Cathy was not able to pass— without acknowledging the resistance of a city council almost entirely owned by corporate interests and controlled by the mayor. She did more than any city council member in recent memory aside from Alex Pederson to represent the neighborhoods, environmentalists, small businesses, crime victims and public safety advocates.
There was a lot of vicious blowback on her support of the ethics initiative. I understand the moral framing of the opposition, but here is a very real-life question for those demonizing council members who supported the legislation. Who pays the minimum wage? Who pays the taxes that keep the city functioning? Property owners, and business owners.If small business, big business, landlords and anyone else putting their livelihood on the line in the city cannot vote on relevant issues when they are a member of the city council, how do small business, big business, landlords, get any kind of voice in legislation? So far the ideologically driven legislation of the city Council has put so much pressure on small landlords that they are leaving the market In droves, and have been for four years. Our rental housing stock has been decimated and private equity is moving in, licking its chops. As a result, the cost of housing, whether for owners or renters, will go up.
Meanwhile, the real elephant in the room, the builders — backed by private equity, which is “big business” In every sense of the word — gets whatever it wants through backdoor channels, through the mayor and the mayor’s advisors.
It was here that I first laughed out loud, “She listened, she responded, — she had common sense.”
From the beginning, Cathy Moore held regular office hours and made sure that her constituents knew that her door was always open. Why is that such a laughing matter? What do you think is the job of a representative? To ignore their constituents? Moore has consistently held community meetings (in person) with constituents and the police department, most recently in response to the nightly shootings on Aurora. Our previous representative of eight years held no meetings, responded to no letters and never acknowledged crime at all.
The overall strategy of the city and the liberal commentariat towards public safety is to gaslight crime victims, and the neighborhoods under siege, and tell them, as the new police chief did recently, that they have a “crime perception problem“ but there’s no actual crime. “Lived experience” counts for nothing here, even when there are bullet holes in the cars on your street, your own car has been stolen multiple times, or you have witnessed or been the victim of assaults. Instead the only thing that matters is statistics, even if they don’t reveal the truth on the ground. If a political party wanted to create a backlash against police reform and bring on the election of far right extremist “law and order” advocates (see the racists and fascists running the country in Washington DC), this is exactly the strategy you would pursue. Seattle seems to have learned absolutely nothing.
Moore has not followed a party line ideology in her decision-making, she has listened to constituents, used common sense and tried to solve problems. We urgently need that in this city.
I can say I entirely disagree with most of Moore’s positions (though a capital gains tax is a great idea, for instance). But face it: Moore was a terrible coucilmember with some anger-related issues, as revealed on this site:
https://publicola.com/2024/04/30/im-losing-my-temper-moore-accuses-morales-of-calling-her-council-colleagues-evil-corporate-shills/
As for “If small business, big business, landlords and anyone else putting their livelihood on the line in the city cannot vote on relevant issues when they are a member of the city council, how do small business, big business, landlords, get any kind of voice in legislation?”
Same as everyone else in the city, and no more than that. Don’t put industry shills in the council and you should be be fine.
Don’t let the door hit you in your entitled ass on the way out, Cathy!