Tag: City Council Appointment 2024

City Council, Elections

In “Foregone Conclusion,” Council Appoints Tanya Woo to Citywide Position
Newly appointed citywide Councilmember Tanya Woo takes questions as council president Sara Nelson looks on.

By Erica C. Barnett

In a vote that Councilmember Tammy Morales called a “foregone conclusion,” the city council appointed Tanya Woo to fill the vacant Position 8 council seat on Tuesday. Woo—a Chinatown-International District activist who recently led a successful campaign to stop the expansion of a Salvation Army shelter in SoDo—lost to District 2 (Southeast Seattle) incumbent Tammy Morales in November; now, she’ll represent the entire city.

The council’s choice for this seat was never truly in question, giving the meeting a pro forma, deflated air. Fewer than half the seats in council chambers were full, and almost no one offered public comment in favor of candidates other than Woo; PubliCola spoke briefly with also-rans Linh Thai and Steve Strand before the meeting, and both were in good spirits but resigned to the inevitable. Strand said he was surprised by how much outright campaigning was involved in seeking a council appointment; Thai said the experience had been positive and renewed his faith in ordinary Seattleites.

The vote, which in past council appointments stretched into multiple “rounds” as council members nominated their own preferred candidates, had a scripted feel, with Dan Strauss and Joy Hollingsworth casting courtesy votes for Vivian Song and Thai, respectively; their votes, along with Morales’ vote for Mari Sugiyama, were just enough to ensure that Woo received a five-vote majority on the first round without taking the decision into contested territory.

During her campaign, Woo touted her experience advocating for the CID community, including elderly residents who don’t speak English, as the leader of a community watch group and a co-owner of the Louisa Hotel, a low-income apartment building. Opponents criticized her for failing to vote in local elections for decades (“I come from a community that does not vote,” Woo said at a recent forum) and for seeking appointment to the citywide seat immediately after losing a single-district election.

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

The councilmember who won that election expressed disappointment in the process that installed her recent election opponent on the council, noting that as much as her new centrist colleagues talked about collaboration and collegiality, they nominated two people who ran against her in a general election—Woo and SPD crime prevention coordinator Mark Solomon—as finalists for the open seat.

“This appointment process should have been set up to give all candidates a fair shake,” Morales said. “But instead, it did become about big business telling donors that they earned the right to tell this council who to choose. And that is deeply problematic, and it is anti-democratic. Seattle voters have been clear, over and over again, that they reject the notion that special interests have a right to buy our elections.”

As PubliCola was first to report last week, political consultant Tim Ceis sent a letter to the funders of the independent expenditure campaigns that swept five new centrist councilmembers into office that their success in those races had “earned you the right to let the Council know not to offer the left the consolation prize of this Council seat” by appointing Seattle School Board member (and former Goldman Sachs analyst) Vivian Song.

Speaking to reporters after the vote, Woo said she thought it was “great that District 2 will have two representatives to serve that district”—herself and Morales. “That district—south Seattle—has been marginalized and, I believe, underserved. It will be great to get double coverage and to be able to work on these issues together,” she said.

Council president Sara Nelson also brought up Ceis’ letter, appearing to blame the media (for the second day in a row) for “the weaponization of a leaked third-party email,” which she called “an effort to cast doubt on the integrity of this process and the outcome of our decision today” as well as “disrespectful” to city council staff and “insulting” to the council itself. In fact, reporting on newsworthy information that politicians would rather keep secret is part of the basic job description of any political reporter, and communications between lobbyists and donors are not government secrets.

Speaking to reporters after the vote, Woo said she thought it was “great that District 2 will have two representatives to serve that district”—herself and Morales. “That district—south Seattle—has been marginalized and, I believe, underserved. It will be great to get double coverage and to be able to work on these issues together,” she said.

Woo will face a citywide election in November; already, one finalist, Bloodworks Northwest government affairs director Juan Cotto, has said he plans to run, and Song told PubliCola after the meeting that she would decide within the next week or so. Asked whether it would be a challenge to run a campaign and be a full-time councilmember, Woo said, “I ran a campaign before, so I think I have that experience. … Doing the work [of a council member] at the same time and expanding that [campaign] to the entire city…. I’m confident that I can do it going forward.”

City Council, Elections, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Issues Hiring Freeze as New Council Members Vow to “Audit the Budget”
City council finalist Tanya Woo was the only applicant to say “no” to the question, “If, after careful review and/or audit, the budget necessitates additional and/or increased revenue, do you support adopting new progressive revenue streams?”

By Erica C. Barnett

On Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell instituted a hiring freeze across all city departments except police, fire, and the 911 response division, now known as the CARE Department. PubliCola broke the news on social media Monday morning. The hiring freeze will include exceptions, on a case-by-case basis, for “employees providing essential public services and employees backfilling for those using the City’s Paid Parental Leave or Paid Family Care Leave,” mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen told PubliCola on Monday.

Housen said the city “faces more significant fiscal challenges in 2024 than were previously known when the 2024 Budget was adopted, requiring immediate action to lessen the impact of increasing costs.”

The freeze, which applies to all vacant positions except those that were already in the hiring process as of Friday, is an attempt to save money in advance of this year’s budget process, when the city will need to a 2025 budget gap currently estimated at $229 million, with a larger shortfall projected in 2026.

While hardly unprecedented, the hiring freeze could serve as a preview for more dramatic cuts in the future.

In 2009, when the city faced a revenue shortfall of more than $70 million, then-mayor Greg Nickels announced hundreds of layoffs and imposed mandatory furloughs on many city workers who survived the cuts, slashing two weeks’ pay from their annual pay. In 2010, and again in 2011, then-mayor Mike McGinn prolonged the carnage, cutting jobs and putting employees on furlough until the financial crisis started to recede. The situation was so bad that McGinn actually broached the idea of imposing a hiring freeze on the police department, something that would be anathema today.

Since 2021, the mayor and city council have used time-limited funds or one-time, such as federal relief dollars and repurposed revenues from the JumpStart tax, to kick-start new program or pay for ongoing needs

The cuts, though arguably necessary, led to a long-term brain drain in departments like the Department of Planning and Development (now divided into separate planning and permitting departments), which eventually lost around 40 percent of its staff.

While the city has gone more than a decade without mass layoffs or furloughs, the issues causing the “structural” budget gap are arguably more daunting than those the city faced during the Great Recession. While the city is subject to the same uncontrollable economic factors as any business, including higher labor and construction costs, city officials made the problem worse by deciding, year after year, to address long-term needs with short-term resources.

Specifically, since 2021, the mayor and city council have used time-limited funds or one-time, such as federal relief dollars and repurposed revenues from the JumpStart tax, to kick-start new program or pay for ongoing needs—like the six-person CARE Team, which responds to low-acuity 911 calls, and wage increases for human services providers. This year’s budget also includes funding for the police surveillance program Shotspotter, which—while funded on a one-time basis with unspent SPD dollars—will almost certainly become an ongoing budget obligation.

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

How well is the new council positioned to address these complex issues? During the campaign, many of the newly elected mebers said they wouldn’t consider raising taxes under any circumstances, or at least until the city agrees to “audit the budget” to find out where the city’s money is going.

During a public forum on Tuesday, all but one of the eight finalists for the open city council seat expressed support for such an “audit,” although none elaborated on what they thought such an audit would look like. (Only Vivian Song resisted the audit’s siren song, noting that an audit is a review of financial processes and transparency and the city is doing pretty good on both counts.)

During comments addressed to the council finalists, Council President Sara Nelson accused “the media” of spinning up “guilt by manufactured association” around Woo—an apparent reference to the fact that Harrell consultant Ceis wrote a letter encouraging business leaders who funded an unsuccessful pro-Woo campaign to help ensure her appointment.

Many of the finalists likened the city budget to household or business spending choices like a “cable package” (West Precinct Police Captain Steve Strand) or toilet handles in hotel rooms (Civic Hotel owner Neha Nariya, who said the city should “dig a little deeper” to cut costs). And Tanya Woo, the council’s presumptive choice, said “no” when Councilmember Cathy Moore asked the candidates if they’d support progressive taxes after a “careful review, and/or audit,” because, Woo said, “we just can’t keep taxing [and] asking for more money from small businesses.”

While there is certainly waste and redundancy in the city’s budget, particularly in city contracts (the mayor, for instance, has two Sound Transit liaisons, a city employee and a high-priced consultant, Tim Ceis), there probably isn’t $229 million of waste and redundancy, an amount that represents around 15 percent of the general fund.

During comments addressed to the council finalists, Council President Sara Nelson accused “the media” of spinning up “guilt by manufactured association” around Woo—an apparent reference to the fact that Harrell consultant Ceis wrote a letter encouraging business leaders who funded an unsuccessful pro-Woo campaign to help ensure her appointment. The “association” between Ceis, businesses, and the candidate businesses spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect, was not manufactured, but factual; you can read Ceis’ full letter in our post.

City Council

Let’s All Pretend the Fix Isn’t In for Tanya Woo and Take a Look at the Other Seven Council Finalists
L-R: Council finalists Linh Thai, Tanya Woo, and Juan Cotto.

By Erica C. Barnett

The appointment process for a vacancy on the Seattle City Council amounts to a accelerated version of a normal city council campaign, in which the electorate has been shrunk to just eight people—the members of the Seattle City Council. The campaign for the open citywide council seat recently vacated by Teresa Mosqueda has felt especially rushed, because the likely winner—Tanya Woo, who lost to Tammy Morales in the race for Council District 2 last year—was anointed before the window for applications had even closed.

If that sounds cynical, well, so is the effort by the business interests (and their longtime lobbyist ally Tim Ceis) to install Woo on the council immediately after voters elected someone else to represent them. Big businesses poured more than a million dollars into last year’s election, and  Woo was the only one of their candidates who lost. Those businesses want to even the score, and most of the council’s new centrist majority have indicated they’re happy to reverse a democratic process to secure a seven-vote supermajority.

This immovable fact has made the whole “campaign” process, including last week’s CityClub-hosted forum for the eight purported finalists, feel a bit like theater. But even an event that won’t change anyone’s mind (and which most council members didn’t bother attending in person) can reveal some things about the state of the city council in Seattle, as well as what the 2025 campaign for this position (which begins, approximately, now) will look like,

Most of the eight finalists—whose names were widely circulated long before the council plucked them from a list of 72 applicants—are people who either have never run for a local election before or who ran and lost to Tammy Morales; of the eight, only Seattle School Board member Vivian Song has been elected to any public office, and both Mark Solomon and Woo ran against Morales unsuccessfully.

While SPD West Precinct Captain Steve Strand joined many of his fellow candidates by saying the city should “audit the budget” and slash spending before raising taxes, he said there was one part of the budget that should be categorically exempt from cuts: Police, who he credited with improving public safety at the “hot spot” intersections of 12th and Jackson and Third and Pike.

That lack of direct experience was evident at last week’s forum. Many candidates struggled to answer basic questions about how the city operates, and retreated to pablum (how, and with what funding, will candidates “audit the budget so we know how the money is being spent,” “preserve generational BIPOC wealth,” or invent new ways of “measuring results”?) and anecdotes. Pointing to a kid in the audience, Bloodworks Northwest government affairs director Juan Cotto told a rambling story about a cancer researcher who responded to a child’s complex question with the “powerful” answer “I don’t know,” which happened to also be his response to a question about balancing the budget.

Here are some other moments that stood out during the forum, which served as Seattle residents’ only lengthy glimpse into the views, priorities, and preparedness of the eight council finalists.

• In response to a question about which neighborhoods in Seattle “should not be upzoned,” Mari Sugiyama, who oversees contracts in the Human Services Department’s Safe and Thriving Communities division, said that before allowing more housing in an area, “we have to think about families where that home might be their only form of generational wealth. And so if you’re upzoning in that area, and they are being pushed out, what sort of impact do you have for their generations to come?” Only Linh Thai, who works for a veterans’ nonprofit, was unambiguous: “Because this is a matter of equity, every neighborhood must upzone,” he said.

• Steve Strand, the captain of SPD’s West Precinct, gave a surprisingly pro-bike response to a question about road safety—the city, he said, should harden its bike infrastructure so riders are protected by physical barriers, not paint on pavement—then immediately backpedaled by saying he would pursue “enforcement” of helmet laws.  King County repealed its mandatory helmet law in 2022, shortly after SPD stopped enforcing it, citing data showing it disproportionately impacted homeless people and people unable to pay fines of up to $150 for helmet violations.

Unsurprisingly, while Strand joined many of his fellow candidates by saying the city should “audit the budget” and slash spending before raising taxes, he said there was one part of the budget that should be categorically exempt from cuts: Police, who he credited with improving public safety at the “hot spot” intersections of 12th and Jackson and Third and Pike.

L-R: Council finalists Vivian Song, Neha Nariya, and Mark Solomon.

• Responding to the same question about making roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists, both Cotto and Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator at SPD, offered personal anecdotes that suggested individual, rather than government, solutions. Cotto said people “drive too fast” and need to slow down, and Solomon said he was fed up with seeing pedestrians failing to pay attention to their surroundings. “It’s amazing how many times I see people walking down the street into traffic, looking at their phones. It’s like, don’t do that!” Solomon said.

Solomon also suggested the city could improve safety by “synchronizing all of our traffic signals, so that they things can flow better. “Synchronizing signals so that cars don’t have to stop or slow down may be more convenient for drivers, but it definitely doesn’t make cyclists or pedestrians safer; the faster a person is driving, the more likely they are to kill or injure anyone they hit.

Despite calling herself a “daughter of Seattle,” Woo has rarely bothered to vote in local elections. “I come from a community that does not vote,” Woo said. “We are not talking about politics, we’re talking about survival.”

• All eight candidates said they would support keeping or even expanding on the new funding for student mental health the council added in last year’s budget, although only Vivian Song seemed to fully grasp the premise of the question. In the wake of the Ingraham high school shooting, students lobbied the council to increase mental-health funding, and former council member Kshama Sawant sponsored a budget amendment to increase the JumpStart payroll tax to provide $20 million a year for student mental health care services.”I’m very excited that the city council recognizes this tremendous need in our community,” Song said, “…and I will make every effort to protect it.”

• Niha Nariya, the owner of the Civic Hotel, responded to a generic question about civic engagement with an out-of-touch anecdote about her nanny, who recently applied for US citizenship and had to take the 100-question naturalization test. “My son, who was four at the time, could not read but would always ask me to tell him the questions so he could ask our nanny at breakfast, and he knew most of the answers before she took her exam,” Nariya said. “And the funny thing is, he would go to school and ask those same questions again to his friends in the class. … Long story short, civic engagement starts with the youth and showing them that they can actually be empowered.”

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

• During a lightning round, every candidate except Song and Nariya said they would support “fixing problems” with the city’s new tree protection ordinance by making it harder to remove trees for development (Nariya held her yes/no paddle sideways and shrugged, seeming to indicate confusion). Nariya and Song both declined to answer a confusing question about the “Luma amendment,” which would increase the number of “heritage” trees that can’t be removed for development by a factor of 25, to more than 8,000. (All of the other candidates said they’d support it) The proposed amendment, named after Western red cedar on the site of a townhouse development in Wedgwood, would prevent new housing in large swathes of Seattle’s single-family neighborhoods.

• In another possible sign of confusion, all eight finalists said they would support a citywide inventory of rental housing, which would provide transparency into the opaque rental housing market. Legislation that would have created exactly this kind of inventory was the only bill Mayor Bruce Harrell vetoed during his first two years in office, so supporting a rental inventory would represent a direct rebuke to the mayor and his agenda—assuming that the finalists understood what they were committing to.

• One question—”Do you have a consistent history of voting on local matters as a private citizen?”—was pointedly aimed at Tanya Woo, the Chinatown/International District activist and presumptive appointee. Despite calling herself a “daughter of Seattle,” Woo has rarely bothered to vote in local elections. “I come from a community that does not vote,” Woo said, adding that she did not mean for this to be an excuse. “We are not talking about politics, we’re talking about survival.” Woo, who worked at KING 5 for a decade, and her husband, a hedge-fund manager, own assets valued between $3 million and $5.1 million, according to her financial disclosure documents.

“This past couple of years,” Woo continued, “I’ve been actively out there trying to register people who have never voted before, people who are in their 80s, 90s, refugees and immigrants, non-English speakers who have voted for the very first time in this past election”—the one in which she was on the ballot and had a direct interest in the outcome.

The council will hold a meeting Monday at 9:30 to take public comments about the appointment and ask the finalists questions for the first time in public before voting to select their new colleague at 2:00 the following day.