By Erica C. Barnett
This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we talked about the big city news of the week: City Councilmember Cathy Moore’s announcement that she’ll resign from the council on July 7, just over 18 months into her four-year term.
Moore said she’s resigning over health and “personal” reasons. Among those personal reasons, quite clearly, is that she quite visibly (and sometimes dramatically) dislikes the part of her job that involves hearing negative feedback from the public. Going back to the very beginning of her brief term, Moore has taken political criticism personally. In February 2024, she demanded that protesters seeking financial support for homeless refugees—who had already been locked out of council chambers—be arrested en masse “threatening” her by chanting and pounding on the wall of council chambers. That was just an early taste of how she would react to criticism for the next year and a half.
While the public can be impolite and annoying, listening to what they have to say (and brushing off personal insults and attacks) is part of the job of representing the public. Seattle residents are extremely engaged in local politics, which is a good thing. Public feedback is how elected officials konw what the public thinks of what their representatives are doing; when elected officials hear overwhelming feedback that, for example, no one likes their proposal to change the council’s ethics rules to allow conflicts of interest, they should listen, not shut down council meetings and threaten arrests.
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Moore’s instinct to accuse the public of “hate” and abuse shows what a poor temperamental fit she is to represent a city council district in Seattle. It’s fine to think being a city council member is a crappy job—in many ways, it is—but perhaps Moore should have watched more council meetings before signing up to run. Given that the most recent spate of meeting disruptions came from a group led by former council member Kshama Sawant, I’d have advised her to watch some of the meetings where Sawant brought hundreds of people to yell and protest, which were far rowdier than this year’s meetings, where she’s rarely mustered more than a couple dozen supporters. That was under the previous council, whose “divisive” nature most of the new council members promised to fix when they were elected in 2023.
Big picture, as Sandeep and I discuss on this week’s podcast, this city council (which includes an unprecedented six members in their first terms, and a seventh who was appointed, not elected) is acting as if it had a mandate from the voters to enact their campaign agendas. In reality, most of them defeated more progressive opponents by small margins in a low-turnout election year, and their constituents include vast numbers of people who didn’t vote for them and don’t like what they’re trying to do. Dealing with that fact requires some humility and a willingness to engage with people you don’t agree with.
Instead, Moore (and others elected in the 2023 anti-progressive backlash) have chosen to lash out at their constituents, blaming the public for being too mean or disruptive and conflating mild criticism with “hate” and abuse. Just this week, on Wednesday, Moore got emotional on the dais over the fact that some people have called her a NIMBY—an acronym that means Not In My Backyard, and aptly applies to politicians who put barriers in the way of development, which Moore has consistently tried to do.
The legislation she was supporting would have added more process to the construction of Sound Transit light rail facilities in Seattle requiring even more “community feedback” on the already-delayed light rail extension from Ballard to West Seattle. Moore, who represents north Seattle, said it was “classist” and offensive to suggest that she and Maritza Rivera, who represents northeast Seattle, wanted to apply different standards to light rail in these neighborhoods than were applied in their districts, which already have light rail.
“This is not about NIMBYism, and it’s going to be spun that way,” Moore said. She continued:
And just the public comments that came were, you know, personal attacks, the ‘Moore-Rivera double punch’ kind of nonsense, personal attacks. It’s just more hate because people don’t agree with the particular positions that we’re taking, in this attempt to make it sound like we don’t give a flying F about anybody that [we] disagree with. It’s nonsense and it’s insulting. I’ve spent my entire life in public service. I started as a public defender. I ate peanut butter sandwiches because I didn’t make enough money. I lived with three other people as a professional. I have spent my entire life working to better others and this, I’m just cannot begin to tell you how tired I am of this narrative.
“Feel free to come and talk to me about how I’ve dedicated 30-plus years to public service and improving the lives of people who don’t have a voice and have chosen to put myself out here, for all this love that I get every day,” she concluded.
While Moore’s comments were about pushback on a light-rail process amendment, I think they summed up her frustration with being on the council in general. As a former judge, Moore came onto the council unaccustomed to taking criticism in person, including harshly worded critiques from a public she couldn’t gavel down. Future council candidates should consider whether they really want every part of the job before seeking to represent the unmanageable public.
While Cathy Moore tries to wade through the mud and static of City Council Meetings, and greeting the public with reasonable hope for a way forward, with the ethics bill she just got worn out of energy. The way forward seemed blocked. Hard to make decent ordinances when the voted in representatives cannot even have a vote on the City Council. This roadblock to building a sustainable policy for the future needs to be looked into by a higher authority. It has a distinctly socialist tint to it (reddish). The courts maybe. Here is a woman who has worked for the public good for 30 years, a former Judge. She has lived on peanut butter sandwiches with three other people in order to learn the ropes and help make our world a better place. She gives up the fight because it appears an impossible task. Is this just politics in Seattle or something bigger, a wave of unreason-ability in the guise of socialism. Let’s have wealth transfer so we can get something free or at least a reduced rate. Businesses and apartment owners, homeowners, will move elsewhere. To have a dynamic city and economy we all need to understand that capital will move away from impossible odds. To have a sustainable city we need a way for the city council to make decent policy.
Why is it at all acceptable that “While the public can be impolite and annoying, listening to what they have to say (and brushing off personal insults and attacks) is part of the job …”?
Should it be part of anyone’s job to be verbally harassed and threatened with violence? Shouldn’t we expect more of each other and hold each other to the standard we hold elected officials?
“Shouldn’t we…hold each other to the standard we hold elected officials?”
Erm, no? They’re *supposed* to be held to a higher standard than people who aren’t in public office precisely because they hold public office.
And, to be fair, being called a “louse,” a “NIMBY” or a “bootlicker” is a marked improvement over being bedaubed with pitch, tar, and feathers.
To paraphrase a popular saying: “it takes bad faith to know bad faith.” With her loose ethics bill, Moore wanted to give her fellow councilmembers the ability to give the city’s renters several swift kicks in the teeth. And yes, that would’ve hurt far more than being called “NIMBY.”
No, your argument rings far too hollow to be taken even remotely seriously.
This is an outstanding analysis, IMO. Both incisive and beautifully written. Kudos.