1. Two weeks ago after PubliCola reported that Police Chief Shon Barnes had picked controversial police captain Mike Tietjen to head up Capitol Hill’s East Precinct, Barnes announced internally that he was removing Tietjen, blaming our “recent article that has raised unease within the East Precinct, leading to a crisis of confidence among our LGBTQIA+ community members.”
As of Thursday, though, Tietjen was still in charge of the precinct, with no clear timeline for replacing him. An SPD spokesperson responded to a list of questions from PubliCola by saying, that “no movement has been made of yet. I do not have a timeline for completion at this time.”
Tietjen has been a high-profile, controversial figure at SPD since at least 2007, when he and his bike patrol partner were accused of planting drugs on a man and arresting him. City investigators later concluded that Tietjen and his partner lied about the arrest (and likely pocketed weed belonging to the suspect). The allegations raised questions about the two men’s credibility in 17 other drug and firearms cases.
More recently, Tietjen became notorious for his actions during the 2020 protests against police brutality after driving onto a sidewalk toward a group of protesters, calling them “cockroaches” when they fled the path of his unmarked SUV. (Tietjen was suspended for that incident and another in which he shoved a protester into a bus stop, slamming their head). During the same period, Tietjen failed to report an incident in which a group of officers, including one who was his direct report, allegedly harassed a trans woman in Capitol Hill, asking her if she “had a dick under” her skirt.
SPD did not respond to PubliCola’s questions about why Tietjen is still at the East Precinct and the process for replacing him.
2. During a recent meeting with restaurant owners at a West Seattle cafe, Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to commit to considering the reinstatement of the “tip credit” for restaurants or other “exemptions” that could make it less expensive to run their businesses.
Seattle’s minimum wage law, passed in 2015, included a “tip credit” that allowed employers to pay sub-minimum wages as long as their workers made enough in tips to bring their overall “minimum compensation” to the city minimum.
The conversation was overheard by a bystander who provided a brief recording of the conversation to PubliCola. In the recording, Harrell can be heard saying that if reelected, “I fully commit, in January, to convene just restaurants” to discuss “what the city can do, from a policy perspective,” to help them deal with Seattle’s high minimum wage—”whether it’s exemptions, or re-discussion of the tip credit, I’ll have that discussion.”
Contacted by PubliCola, a spokesman for the mayor said, “Rolling back the minimum wage and reinstating the tip credit is not a policy we’re considering now or in the future. The mayor will always meet with small businesses to hear their ideas[.]”
The 2015 minimum wage law, passed unanimously by a city council that included Harrell, gave restaurants and other businesses that rely on customers to pay their workers’ wages through tips 10 years to adjust to the fact that they would have to pay the full minimum wage in 2025. Last year, Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth tried unsuccessfully to preserve the tip credit indefinitely.
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3. Harrell’s proposed budget preserves cuts made last year to the Department of Construction and Inspections’ tenant assistance program, which the city reduced from about $2.4 million to $1.6 million between 2024 and 2025. The tenant services program pays for counseling, legal aid, education, and other assistance to tenants facing eviction or navigating landlord-tenant conflicts. Some of organizations whose city funding was cut or remained flat this year include the Tenants Union, United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, Solid Ground, and the Housing Justice Project, along with half a dozen others.
Harrell’s 2026 budget proposal includes no inflation adjustments, meaning that in real terms, nonprofits whose funding stayed flat will continue to experience reductions in their ability to pay staff salaries and other costs that are funded through SDCI.
In a letter to the city council earlier this month, seven groups that depend on city funding to operate their programs asked the council to reverse the cuts made last year and add more funding to address inflation and augment programs at a time when evictions and homelessness are approaching record highs. The most cost-effective way to address homelessness is prevention, by helping people stay housed,” the organizations wrote. “When rental assistance is paired with tenant services it becomes far more effective, ensuring resources are used efficiently to keep people stably housed.”
Progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck reportedly plans to introduce a budget amendment that would add $1 million to the budget for tenant services, restoring last year’s cut and addressing some of the inflationary cost increases over the past two years.
Last year, then-councilmember Tammy Morales did manage to get $355,000 in the budget to reduce the mayor’s proposed cuts to tenant services, but failed to get support for restoring another $456,000 in cuts. The council is similarly constituted this year, with Rinck, rather than Morales, as the lone consistent progressive on a centrist council focused on boosting the police budget, not helping tenants access legal aid.
We’ve reached out to Rinck about her amendment and will update this post if we hear back.
Maritza Rivera’s amendments would shrink neighborhood centers—areas where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly legal—across her northeast Seattle district.
The comprehensive plan sets rules for how Seattle develops in the future, including where the city will allow its renter majority to live.
By Erica C. Barnett
After nearly a year of delays, the city council is finally getting ready to put its stamp on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 10-year Comprehensive Plan—a document Harrell has branded with his campaign slogan as the “One Seattle Plan.” The council has been meeting for months to discuss elements of the plan, including the creation of a few dozen new “neighborhood centers” where apartments will be allowed for the first time in decades, but this week was the council’s first opportunity to propose tweaks to the plan—107 amendments in all.
The comprehensive plan sets policies for growth and development, designating where new housing, transportation, and other infrastructure should go and placing limits on housing density in the city’s neighborhoods. It’s updated every 10 years, with periodic amendments, and inevitably reflects the political priorities of whoever is in office at the time.
We’ve reported previously on the Harrell Administration’s reluctance to allow significantly more housing in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods as part of the plan.
After killing an early draft of the plan that would have allowed significantly more density, Harrell released a plan last year that fell far short of the changes necessary to create enough housing for new and current residents—including renters—to live in Seattle affordably. After intense criticism of that proposal—the city’s Planning Commission said it upheld exclusionary policies rooted in redlining and failed to provide the housing Seattle needs—the mayor came back with a new plan that allowed slightly more housing, though still less than the proposal most members of the current city council said they supported when they ran for election in 2023.
The council’s proposed amendments are a mixed bag. Several proposals would collectively shrink the size of the proposed “neighborhood centers”—areas within 800 feet of certain frequent transit stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be allowed—by hundreds of acres, in a blatant retreat to old single-family zoning patterns that benefit people who already own property and don’t want renters living in “their” neighborhoods.
Others would impose new restrictions on any new development that requires removing trees, including one that would give the city free rein to force builders to redo projects if even one tree, of any size, was threatened.
Still others would provide new incentives for developers to build dense housing, serving as a counterpoint to other councilmembers’ proposals to shrink the areas of the city where people who can’t afford to buy a house in Seattle are allowed to live.
Breaking the substantive amendments down into broad categories, we have:
Expanded Neighborhood Centers
On balance, the proposed amendments that make it easier to build housing—including everything from density bonuses for affordability to expanded and brand-new neighborhood centers—outweigh NIMBY proposals to restrict housing, although some of the proposals are probably nonstarters—or negotiation starters—in their current forms.
Harrell’s final comprehensive plan proposal included 3o neighborhood centers—down from 48 in an early draft, but more than the 24 included in an early version of the plan. Since then, though, there’s been intense pressure on the council to further reduce the number of neighborhood centers in the plan, coming primarily from incumbent homeowners in neighborhoods like Wedgwood, Madrona, and Maple Leaf.
Although several council members did end up proposing amendments that would scale down the size of neighborhood centers, in some cases dramatically, the amendments to add new areas of potential density outweigh those proposals, meaning that if every proposed change to the neighborhood centers was adopted, the amount of land in designated neighborhood centers would increase significantly.
Council members who proposed new or expanded neighborhood centers included Dan Strauss (who proposed a new East Ballard neighborhood center and called for expanding the boundaries of five others, including in Magnolia), Bob Kettle (who proposed a new North Queen Anne/Nickerson Neighborhood Center) and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who’s proposing eight new neighborhood centers, one in each council district.
“Seattle needs more housing,” Rinck said. “Seattle also needs full and thriving communities, and we’ve heard an overwhelming call from constituents to achieve these goals with more housing, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods which haven’t seen proportional growth.”
Build This, Not That
Other proposed amendments would add density bonuses and incentives for different types of housing, such as stacked flats and affordable apartments.
Kettle, for instance, proposed getting rid of an “amenity area” requirement for new housing in neighborhood residential zones, freeing up more land for housing.
Under the current proposal, 20 percent of the space around new apartment buildings in the city’s traditional single-family areas would be reserved for open space, typically a yard, for residents to “recreate on site”—as if what apartment dwellers in cities really want is a tiny lawn where they can all hang out together.
An amendment from Sara Nelson would retain a requirement that residential buildings, including new apartments in all parts of the city, be exempt from environmental review under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA); that exemption is otherwise set to expire next month, making housing harder to build.
Other amendments, from Hollingsworth, Nelson, Kettle, and Rinck, would provide bonus density for developers who agree to build specific types of housing, including social housing, accessory dwelling units, and low-income or affordable housing. Several proposals would create incentives for developers to build stacked flats—apartments spread out across a single story of a building—including density bonuses for retaining trees and amendments that would allow stacked flats to be denser than other types of apartments in neighborhood residential (former single-family) zones.
Rob Saka also has an amendment that would give a density bonus for one- or two-story “cottage” apartments surrounding a large common area, a style that resembles single-family housing more than the three-to-six-story apartments that will be allowed in the new neighborhood residential zones under the current plan.
Strauss proposed an amendment that would increase the maximum height in these areas from six to seven or eight stories immediately next to a major transit stop, and Rinck proposed changing the definition of “major transit stop” to include high-frequency buses.
15-Minute City
Several amendments would reduce or remove mandatory parking requirements. The most ambitious, from Rinck, would “remove parking requirements citywide for all land uses in all zones,” a phrase that brings joy to my car-hating little heart. (Yes, I own a car. No, I don’t think the city should socially engineer car culture, as it currently does.)
Builders wouldn’t be barred from including parking in their developments, but they wouldn’t be forced to do so, as they are in many places under the city’s current code.
Another amendment from Rinck, essentially a backup if her first parking proposal fails would reduce parking mandates to comply with a statewide parking reform bill that requires cities to eliminate some of their parking mandates by 2028. Another proposal, from Strauss, would establish parking maximums in the city’s regional centers—the densest areas, including downtown, Capitol Hill, and Strauss’ home turf of Ballard. In a concession to the tree-preservation lobby, Rinck’s amendments also include one that would eliminate parking mandates for developments that preserve trees.
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A proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods could also see some meaningful changes.
In the past, we’ve dunked on Harrell’s proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods, because it would only allow new stores and restaurants on literal corner lots, with restrictions that don’t apply to other businesses in the city, such as a mandatory 10pm closing time. Several amendments attempt to remedy those issues. The amendments range from extremely modest (a Nelson amendment that would remove the literal-corner requirement but retain restrictions on business type, size, and closing hours) to ambitious, by Seattle standards (a Rinck proposal that would remove the corner requirement, allow businesses to be open past 10pm, and add bars to the list of businesses that are legal in neighborhoods.
Three amendments, from Rinck, Strauss, and Nelson, would make it easier to open stores and restaurants in residential neighborhoods where they’re currently banned. As we’ve reported, Harrell’s comp plan proposal would allow corner stores in neighborhoods, but only on literal corners, with additional restrictions such as mandatory 10pm closures and a stipulation that they can include restaurants, but not bars.
The amendments range from modest (amendments from Strauss and Nelson to allow stores throughout residential zones, not just on corners) to ambitious (a Rinck proposal that would allow restaurants and bars throughout these areas, eliminate a requirement that businesses be closed from 10pm to 6am, and ditch a 2,500-square-foot size restriction included in the mayor’s proposal). Allowing bars in neighborhoods, a policy that works fine in big cities across the country, may be a bridge too far for censorious Seattle, but a compromise between these proposals could be a first step toward creating more 15-minute neighborhoods in Seattle.
Homeowners vs. Renters
Of course, it wouldn’t be a zoning update without some NIMBY poison pills. Although no one, including newly appointed District 5 Councilmember Debora Juarez, has proposed reviving former D5 councilmember Cathy Moore’s quixotic effort to remove an entire neighborhood center from Maple Leaf, several councilmembers have proposed reducing the amount of land in their districts where people who rent apartments can live.
Maritza Rivera, who has frequently claimed that the city did insufficient outreach to single-family neighborhoods before allowing apartments near frequent transit stops, has three amendments to shrink neighborhood centers in Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood. Her proposal to scale back the Wedgwood center is the most radical of the three, in that it would reduce the size of the center by about 40 percent, limiting apartments to 35th Ave. NE, already a busy arterial, and prohibiting them in the adjacent blocks. (In contrast, one of Rinck’s amendments would expand the Wedgwood neighborhood center to the south; expect strong objections from Rivera to that one).
“Based on months of feedback from community members who live in and near the proposed neighborhood centers, my amendments modify the boundaries of the neighborhood centers in the D4, including Wedgwood, Bryant and Ravenna, to reflect resident concerns…. around the ability of local neighborhood streets to handle increased growth and the infrastructure,” Rivera said.
A Rivera amendment for Ravenna traces a similar line to carve single-family houses in a designated historic district (itself a way for older neighborhoods to oppose density) out of the proposed neighborhood center around Third Place Books, leaving the commercial area but ensuring that there would be no apartments in the neighborhood surrounding the commercial center.
Separately, Rivera proposed an amendment that would give the city the HOA-like authority to dictate what kind of external siding would be allowed on buildings within designated national or local historic districts, based on factors like the “historic character” of an area; this extraordinary new power would also apply to historic districts that might be designated in the future, including those proposed by house owners who oppose new development in their neighborhoods.
Joy Hollingsworth wants to cut the Madrona Neighborhood Center by about seven blocks, concentrating new housing into a smaller area that already includes parks, schools, and other areas where housing can’t be built.
Joy Hollingsworth has proposed shrinking down another controversial neighborhood center in Madrona, whose homeowning residents showed up en masse to oppose the zoning change in their neighborhood. Hollingsworth’s amendment would shrink the Madrona center by nearly 40 percent, slicing off big chunks of current single-family areas on the east and west sides of the proposed center and concentrating any new housing around an existing commercial stretch that includes an elementary school, library, and playfield where housing can’t be built.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a conversation about housing in 2025 without hand-wringing over trees—not planting or maintaining trees in public spaces, which are actions the city could take at any time, or encouraging property owners to plant new trees themselves, but preserving trees that already exist, generally at the expense of new development.
In addition to the tree preservation incentives I mentioned earlier, there’s an amendment from Strauss to “recognize the importance of the natural environment and native species, including trees, bees, salmon, orca, and herons,” plus several from Rivera to make it harder to develop housing if trees are on site.
The most extreme proposal from Rivera—and the one that made Rinck confirm with council staff that the amendment really would do what it appeared to do—would allow the city to require developers to come up with a completely new alternative plan if it turned out their housing proposal would require the removal of any tree, no matter its size, age, or viability.
It’s easy to see how this could grind development in traditional single-family areas to a halt. If someone planted a sapling on a property slated for development, or if there was already unremarkable small tree on site, the city could stop the project and require the developer to start from scratch.
Housing is already tremendously expensive to build in Seattle, and construction permits are declining as developers pull out of the city. Empowering unelected city staffers to force full project redesigns around every existing tree would exacerbate the housing crisis, adding costs to projects that are already financed while reducing the amount of housing that could be built in every project with a tree on site. And forget about expanding the city’s tree canopy—who would plant a new tree on a property they may want to sell in the future, knowing it would instantly reduce their property value?
In an interview with PubliCola, mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, who narrowly lost to Mike McGinn in 2009, said he opposes encampment sweeps, supports an “intervention”-style approach to addiction, and would focus on “respect for women” in an effort to reform the misogynistic culture of the Seattle Police Department.
Facing a likely budget deficit of $250 million or more, the Seattle City Council has started discussing new sources of money to backfill general fund spending and stave off major budget cuts. The latest ideas, which came up in a budget meeting this week, include borrowing funds from the housing levy (ultimately resulting in the construction of less housing) and preemptively allowing the proceeds from a future business and occupation tax increase to be spent on any purpose.
In an unusual confrontation in open court, Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid excoriated the criminal division chief for City Attorney Ann Davison’s office, Fred Wist, for his office’s ongoing refusal to allow Judge Pooja Vaddadi to hear DUI and domestic violence cases. Davison filed a blanket affidavit of prejudice against Vaddadi in 2023, relegating the elected judge to reviewing traffic tickets.
For her entire 18-month term, former councilmember Cathy Moore refused to consider appointments to the city’s Renters Commission, and was working to replace the group with a joint landlord-tenant commission when she resigned. When the vice chair of her committee, Mark Solomon, moved to approve the appointments, two committee members, Sara Nelson and Rob Saka, bailed, depriving the committee of quorum and thwarting their appointments—again.
After a public outcry over the thwarted renters’ commission appointments, Council President Sara Nelson announced the full council will consider the nominations next Tuesday. Also, we took a look at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign claim that he oversaw the creation of “3,000 units of emergency housing” and found it wanting. And: The six nominees for the District 5 city council appointment discussed crime and other issues at two public forums; the council will appoint a new colleague, likely former councilmember Debora Juarez, next week.
The city council tapped the brakes on Cathy Moore’s fast-tracked legislation to ban companies from using algorithmic tools like RealPage to set rent prices, pushing a vote on the bill back one week over Moore’s strenuous objections. The bill, which is likely to pass, largely replicates a proposed state law that did not move forward this year.
RealPage and similar services analyze both public and proprietary rent data to recommend rents to property management companies. The state of Washington has sued RealPage over the practice, which critics say amounts to illegal collusion to keep rents high and hold units vacant, contributing to the housing crisis.
The conflict that arose at the council meeting on Monday stemmed largely from a debate over whether a clause requested by building owners to ensure they could still use software (including consumer software like ChatGPT) to compare and compile publicly available rent data should be included in the bill’s nonbinding “whereas” section, as Moore proposed, or in the legislation itself, where it would have the force of law.
Groups representing property owners, like the Washington Multifamily Housing Association, also complained that Moore didn’t reach out to them before proposing the legislation, which passed out of Moore’s housing committee after a mere 35 minutes of discussion last week, and argued that the bill could negatively impact hotels and people who operate Airbnbs.
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Moore, who will step down on July 7, argued that the legislation was already “thoroughly vetted” at the state level and didn’t need any more local process. “My position is that we should move forward, that we are not going to wind up with a better product, and that we are here today, fully informed of what this bill does because of the stakeholdering it received in Olympia … and that we do not have the time to continue to delay a tool that we have to begin to address the affordability crisis in our city,” Moore said.
Moore’s opposition to a one-week delay on her bill stood in marked contrast to her position on the city’s much-delayed comprehensive plan update, which Moore has consistently decried because she does not think neighborhoods have been consulted enough about plans to allow apartments within two blocks of about 30 frequent transit stops.
When Kettle pushed back on Moore’s statement that her bill had already been thoroughly vetted in Olympia, saying that state legislators often got it wrong (“I just have way too many examples on public safety where Olympia has failed us,” he said), Moore responded sharply. “I think it’s insulting to say that Olympia always gets it wrong. To me, that’s an indication of the continued arrogance of this jurisdiction, to think that only Seattle knows how to do it,” she said.
This statement, too, was a bit ironic: Moore tried to poison-pill a new state law requiring cities to allow between four and six housing units on all lots previously preserved exclusively for single-family houses by imposing affordability requirements that would make these small developments infeasible in Seattle; she also advocated for new setback and tree requirements that would similarly discourage development and undercut the intent of the state legislature.
The council voted 6-2-1 to delay the legislation a week, with Moore and Joy Hollingsworth voting no. Maritza Rivera, who owns a rental unit, abstained. (Mark Solomon was renting out half his duplex, but has said a family member is now living there, eliminating his financial conflict of interest.)
Mayor Bruce Harrell is proposing legislation that would expand the city’s ability to shut down so-called chronic nuisance properties by holding businesses responsible for incidents that occur “in proximity” to their property, if the person who violated the law was a patron or customer of the business and “facts and circumstances establish a nexus between the property and the nuisance activity.”
The legislation would also add violations of state liquor laws to the violations that can get a property tagged as a “chronic nuisance,” allowing the city to sanction or shut down bars and nightclubs if they violate liquor laws repeatedly—or if their patrons violate liquor laws after they’ve left the premises. If a business violates the nuisance law more than three times in 60 days, or seven times in a year, the city can take actions ranging from a fine to shutting the business down.
Currently, the city’s chronic nuisance law only applies to incidents that occur on the premises of a business or property. This limited approach, according to Harrell’s proposed legislation, has allowed “Nuisance activities … including homicides and aggravated assaults, to occur near certain properties in Pioneer Square.” In May, for example, four people were shot outside the OHM Nightclub near Occidental Park, three of them fatally.
Seattle has a long history of passing legislation to restrict nightlife or expand business owners’ legal liability for their patrons’ behavior in response to tragic incidents or repeated neighborhood complaints.
In fact, Harrell’s proposal is strikingly similar to the 1999 “added activities ordinance,” which would have made bars and clubs liable for noise, litter, traffic, and crime that happened nearby, in areas they don’t directly control. At the time, proponents said expanding the law was necessary because of issues the city tied to clubs in Pioneer Square and on the downtown waterfront. The proposal, backed by then-city attorney Mark Sidran, floundered after a federal judge ruled that a similar state law that required venues to get special licenses for dancing, live music, and other “added” activities, was unconstitutional.
On its face, Harrell’s proposal seems less restrictive than the added activities ordinance—it doesn’t apply to urban annoyances like noise and litter. But the list of activities it would hold businesses newly liable for on the sidewalks and streets around them is broad, including not only criminal offenses, ranging from assault to failure to disperse, but drug and liquor violations that might occur down the block from a business, or even further away—the bill doesn’t define what it means for a nuisance to be “in proximity” to a property.
Harrell’s legislation notes that the existing chronic nuisance ordinance has only been used 17 times since it was adopted in 2009—a tacit reassurance that if the city gives the mayor and police chief power to hold clubs liable for off-premises activities, they won’t abuse it. But the letter of the proposed law would allow the city to shut a bar or nightclub down if people are caught smoking weed or drinking alcohol in a public area outside the bar, and nothing in the proposal constrains police from keeping an extra-close eye on properties the city has identified as potential targets for abatement under the expanded nuisance law.
The legislation hasn’t shown up in the council’s legislative tracking system yet. When it does, it will go through Harrell ally Bob Kettle’s public safety committee.
2. On Wednesday, the City Council’s housing and human services committee approved legislation that would prohibit property owners and managers from using algorithmic rent-setting companies like Real Page to determine rent prices. The bill, sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore, took the committee just 35 minutes—35 minutes!—to discuss and approve. The fast-tracked bill now heads to the full council, which could vote on the bill before Moore departs the council on July 7.
Moore has come under fire for supporting legislation, which she was set to sponsor, that would roll back a number of anti-eviction laws passed by the previous council, including the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums and a $10 cap on late fees. Moore also proposed legislation that would have rewritten the city’s ethics code so that council members could vote in their own financial interest; that proposal faced stiff opposition, and Moore withdrew it shortly before announcing she would step down a year and a half into her term.
Advocates who’ve opposed Moore on other policies applauded her for pushing the ban on algorithmic pricing, which uses both public and proprietary data to recommend rent prices. The state and federal governments have sued the largest algorithmic pricing company, RealPage, over the practice, which critics say amounts to illegal collusion among property management companies to keep rents high and hold units vacant until they can charge more, contributing to the housing crisis. At the time then-attorney general Bob Ferguson sued RealPage last year, his office estimated that about 800,000 leases had been priced using RealPage in the state since 2017.
“While it’s hard to measure the impact [in Seattle] precisely, it is likely that this has contributed significantly to the rapidly rising rents that we’ve seen coming out of the pandemic,” Transit Riders Union leader and mayoral candidate Katie Wilson said. “Landlords and property managers, following the instructions that they get from RealPage … end up raising rents more than they otherwise would, forcing tenants out when they can’t afford the increase.”
A ProPublica investigation found that companies using RealPage sometimes leave units vacant on purpose to help drive up the cost of other units.
The state legislature took up statewide legislation to ban algorithmic rent-fixing tools earlier this year, but advocates in Olympia opted instead to focus on passing the landmark rent stabilization bill, a legislator who worked on both bills told PubliCola.
As the city council considers eliminating the requirement that council members recuse themselves from matters in which they have a financial interest—a change that would, at the very least, eliminate pressure for landlords Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon to sit out an upcoming vote to roll back laws that help tenants avoid eviction—we took a look back at the other times city council members have recused themselves in the past.
Currently, the city’s ethics code requires all city employees, including city council members, to recuse themselves from taking action on anything that would present a financial conflict. (The code also requires employees to disclose other potential conflicts to the head of the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission).
As we’ve reported, it has been extremely rare for city council members to recuse themselves because of financial conflicts in the past; looking through a list of past “disqualifications” maintained by the City clerk, we found nine potential examples of such recusals between 2001 and 2025. (The numbers are not exact because, in some cases, the disclosure form explaining the reasons for the recusal was not available online).
In addition to those recusals, there were dozens of examples in which council members sat out votes because they had a direct interest (such as when a council member was getting an appointment and didn’t want to vote for himself or herself) or when the interest was direct but not financial, such as several instances in which then-councilmember Bruce Harrell sat out votes that would benefit the University of Washington because his wife Joanne was on the school’s Board of Trustees.
What’s interesting about the council’s past financial conflicts—and is directly relevant to the timing of the proposal to loosen the city’s ethical standards for council members—is that most of them involved legislation that would benefit or harm council members directly because of property they owned, including rental properties.
If the ethics changes, sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore, pass quickly, Solomon and Rivera will be under no official obligation to abstain on legislation Moore plans to introduce in the next few weeks that would alter the city’s landlord-tenant rules.
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According to multiple sources familiar with internal deliberations on the plan, Moore’s bill would eliminate the winter and school-year eviction moratoria, raise the minimum fee for late rent from $10 to $50, and repeal a law requiring landlords to allow renters to add new roommates to their lease without asking permission first.
Landlords and property owners on the city council haven’t always recused themselves from voting for (or against) their own interests. But they also have done so, with some regularity. In 2013 and 2018, for example, then-councilmember Sally Bagshaw sat out votes establishing new taxes for property owners near the waterfront and downtown, respectively, citing the fact that she lives in the area and would have to pay both taxes (which were approved).
Harrell and former councilmember Mike O’Brien recused themselves from multiple votes on the Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance (RRIO), which requires landlords to register their rentals with the city and allow regular inspections, because they were both landlords at the time (according to campaign finance reports, Harrell no longer owns any rental property.)
Jan Drago, who lived in Pioneer Square, also recused herself from legislation that allowed more density in her neighborhood. (This was in the era before district elections, which pretty much sent that sort of recusal out the window.)
And Jean Godden and Tom Rasmussen recused themselves from voting on a deal with Triad Development that was supposed to build a 650,000-square-foot office and residential tower in the hole in the ground across from City Hall (stop by that block sometime if you want to know how that project went), although public records and media coverage from the time don’t indicate why (and I don’t remember.)
And, of course, Tanya Woo (very reluctantly) recused herself from a vote on legislation that would have lowered the minimum wage for “gig” delivery workers, because she and her husband own a restaurant. Woo’s family also owns an apartment building that provides affordable housing under a tax-credit program.
In those cases, council members’ recusals didn’t affect the vote. But they could in the case of Moore’s rental housing legislation, which faces stiff opposition from tenant advocates (add tenants themselves). If the new law was in place now, Rivera and Solomon (who own a single rental apartment each and earn between $0 and $29,999 a year from rental income, according to their campaign finance reports), would only have to disclose their conflicts, rather than determining with Ethics and Elections whether they’re conflicted out. Without their votes, the legislation would face a tougher path to passage.
The city also keeps records of city officials’ conflict-of-inflict disclosures, which include everything from personal or family relationships (as when Harrell appointed his niece, Monisha Harrell, as senior deputy mayor) to business ownership (Council President Sara Nelson disclosed her ownership stake in Fremont Brewing, but did not recuse herself, during a vote on the city’s maritime-industrial land use policy.)
Most of these documents are straightforward descriptions of a potential appearance of conflict. One, though, is the exact opposite: A defensive letter from Rob Saka, who added $1.5 million to last year’s budget to turf the field where his kids play, and Saka coaches, Little League.
Saka began his “disclosure” by noting that he was only making it because he recently “became aware of certain criticism from a member of the public that there was an alleged appearance of a conflict of interest” in his budget add.
Saka goes on to cite “numerous calls for more turf playfields from members of the public” and an “extensive consultation process” that just happened to conclude that the field where Saka coaches his kids was the best candidate for a new turf field. Also last year, Saka set aside $2 million to remove a road divider that prevented drivers from making a left turn across a double yellow line into the preschool his kids attended, which he compared to Trump’s border wall.
As of Thursday, though, Tietjen was still in charge of the precinct, with no clear timeline for replacing him. An SPD spokesperson responded to a list of questions from PubliCola by saying, that “no movement has been made of yet. I do not have a timeline for completion at this time.”
Currently, the city’s chronic nuisance law only applies to incidents that occur on the premises of a business or property. This limited approach, according to Harrell’s proposed legislation, has allowed “Nuisance activities … including homicides and aggravated assaults, to occur near certain properties in Pioneer Square.” In May, for example, four people were shot outside the OHM Nightclub near Occidental Park, three of them fatally.