By Erica C. Barnett

The 2023 election will dramatically reshape the Seattle City Council. Four council members are not seeking reelection, while a fifth, Teresa Mosqueda, is running for King County Council and will be replaced by an appointee if she wins. Even if all three of the incumbents who are running win reelection, the council will probably have at least five new members next year—a new majority of freshmen on a council whose most experienced members will, at most, be entering their second terms. If all eight seats turn over, it would make Sara Nelson, an at-large council member who started her first term last year, the most senior member of the council.

Debates over issues and ideology are understandably front and center in campaigns. But with eight of nine council seats up for grabs, I want to focus for a moment on an often overlooked question that impacts how the city council makes decisions and functions on a daily basis:  Can these people work together? Among the current council, the answer is frequently no. At best, there’s a sense that council members aren’t talking to each other outside public meetings, which are still largely virtual. At worst, the hostility bursts out into the open—as it has during this election, when one council member, Sara Nelson, is actively campaigning against three of her incumbent colleagues.

In this setting, five—and up to eight—new council members could provide a needed reset and eliminate some of the bad blood that has built up over the past several years.

Less optimistically, an inexperienced council could leave Mayor Bruce Harrell’s exercise of executive power unchecked, allowing the mayor to push through any number of priorities that the current council has shot down—like raiding the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to be spend on housing and equitable development, to pay for general city obligations.

The next council will have to get up to speed fast, because they’ll soon face challenges that are only growing in scope—from homelessness, gun violence, and addiction to a looming $250 million budget deficit that will require tough decisions and could mean significant service cuts.

To get a better sense of how council incumbents, challengers, and first-time candidates would tackle these challenges, PubliCola spoke with 10 of the 14 council candidates, representing every council district.

Two candidates—Rob Saka in District 1 and Tanya Woo in District 2—ignored our emailed requests to sit down for an interview and did not follow up after I asked again in person. One candidate, District 3’s Joy Hollingsworth, set up an interview but then canceled, and did not respond to my request to reschedule. Maritza Rivera, running in District 4, would not sit down for an interview but did provide emailed responses to written questions. And Cathy Moore, in District 5, declined my request in an email.

The number of candidates who declined, canceled, or ignored our requests for an interview is unusual. While PubliCola isn’t shy about expressing our views on issues, that has rarely been an impediment to dialogue in the past. These candidates’ refusal to sit down for an in-depth conversation about the issues they will have to address if elected could bode poorly for transparency on the new council; in our experience, candidates who refuse to talk to members of the press they perceive as critical rarely become more tolerant of tough questions under the pressure of public office.

I’ll be rolling out interviews with the council candidates in every race over the next two weeks. I hope readers will learn more about the candidates from these in-depth conversations and use them to inform your vote. Ballots go out on October 18.

Today’s interview is with Fremont Chamber of Commerce director Pete Hanning, who’s challenging Councilmember Dan Strauss in District 6 (northwest Seattle, west Magnolia). For 20 years, Hanning owned the Red Door, a bar in Fremont; he’s also a longtime member of the Fremont Neighborhood Council.

PubliCola [ECB]: On my way [to Lighthouse Roasters], I passed a ‘Defund Dan’ sign on Phinney Ridge. Was that yours?

Pete Hanning [PH]: It was!

ECB: Are you saying people should vote against Strauss because of his vote in 2020 to cut funding for the police, and is that a fair characterization, given that he has since clarified his position and called that vote a mistake?

PH: ‘Defund Dan’ is more an acknowledgement of how he has flip-flopped on the issue, saying he was for police and police hiring, and then he was for defunding. Now, he’s saying, ‘Oh, I have great relationships [with police].’ I think it’s indicative of his lack of leadership in a really important area.

If he was really strongly for standing up a third [first responder] agency, if he had real ideas about what that would look like and how that would make us a safer community, that would be great. But all he talks about is money. That’s not the only resource that we’re talking about here. We’re also talking about a relationship that needs to be rebuilt on both sides, between law enforcement and the city, and the city council in particular. I have a strong intention to rebuild that relationship with law enforcement so that they know that they are part of the solution, that they are respected, that we understand their role, and that we support them as best we can—while, at the same time, understanding that they have to be both reflective of our community, and also have work to do on their end to make sure that they really are being the civil servants we have.

ECB: There have been some very high-profile incidents recently where police were caught behaving abhorrently. So when you’re talking about repairing relationships, it sounds like you’re saying that’s the city and council’s responsibility, and not the responsibility of police to fix the culture of the department.

PH: Any relationship has multiple sides. But we have to find a way forward, I strongly believe that we want and need healthy law enforcement to be part of our solution.

The police department is a reflection of our culture, and us as a totality. It is not us versus them in any situation. It is us versus us. And one of the things I’ve been really noticing, as I’ve run for city council, is that we are so polarized in almost every issue. There is this desire for purity, whether we’re talking about environmental issues, the trees, our response to homelessness and addiction, or reforming our police and criminal justice systems.

ECB: Can you give me a concrete example of a law-enforcement policy that you would support that Councilmember Strauss does not support?

PH:  I believe that we need to be able to know when our officers are using—when they are struggling with substance use. We know in the general public what the percentages are. And we know that when you work in stressful jobs, certain substances are abused even more. We have a right to know and we should want to know, because a they have a job in which they have a legal firearm, and they are in positions where really difficult decisions have to be made in a snap of the fingers. And I also am concerned about their own internal culture—I want a police force that’s healthy and whole. [Police] Chief [Adrian] Diaz talks a lot how we should always be making sure that we are putting the tools in place. One of those is making sure that people know addiction is not a crime, and it is treatable. And we need to know when those officers are struggling.

ECB: You mentioned the SPOG contract. The Seattle City Council doesn’t have that much direct say over it, but they are responsible for laying out their priorities and passing legislation that can guide the terms of the contract itself. Are there any must-haves for you in the next contract?

PH: I think the must-have is we have to a respect their right to be able to collectively bargain. They need to be working under a contract for them to change their culture. They also have to have some of that protection. And so this is a two-way street where neither side is going to get everything they want. It’s kind of analogous in a different way to the Missing Link [the long-delayed bike lane connection along the Burke-Gilman trail in Ballard]. We’ve wasted too much time. The continuation of not having them under contract really causes more harm in our community. [Editor’s note: The Seattle police are under contract; it’s just the contract signed in 2018, which still applies during contract negotiations.]

ECB: The drug criminalization law that just passed gives the police more new responsibilities, like enforcing the new law, directing people to diversion programs, and deciding whether people pose a risk to themselves or others. How do you think the police should implement the law, and what kind of diversion programs do you support?

PH: Jail is the least preferable outcome for many situations. But it has to be one of the options, to really put some tension on those diversionary opportunities for people. Fentanyl is a different kind of drug. It’s a poison in our community. And I’m really concerned that we don’t have mechanisms to really encourage people to seek treatment, and we’re just allowing them to stay in that cycle. I am not a proponent of arresting people who are suffering from drug addiction. That’s not going to solve anything. The police officers themselves recognize that, nor do they want to be doing that.

If you and I were to go down to Leary Way and be around those encampments, it’s pretty quickly apparent the vast majority of these people need our help and services. And then one or two of those vans, RVs, or tents—those people aren’t in crisis. They’re the ones who are perpetrating the crime on our most vulnerable and keeping them in this cycle of addiction. We should put more emphasis on them. And we have to be supportive not just of law enforcement but we have to make sure that all the systems along that pathway are also in line and they all understand that our goal is to heal people and to get them back into community. And that so that’s the prosecutor, whether it’s the city attorney or the King County Prosecutor, it’s the courts, and it’s jail or diversionary programs, and treatment.

And then those folks who are selling the fentanyl, that is typically not the only crime in which you’re engaging. You’re forcing people into sex work, you’re fencing stolen goods, and that puts pressure on our businesses that are being shoplifted at such a high rates. We have to start holding folks accountable for criminal activity. Because it is affecting not just the businesses—it affects my pocketbook. It impacts our feeling of safety in the community. It affects how people feel our government is being responsive or not responsive to what’s happening. And so we definitely have a responsibility to prosecute those kinds of crimes.

ECB: I have another example. There was an incident recently where a man experiencing a mental-health crisis, someone who is well-known to social service providers and police, chopped down a tree in Ballard and dragged it down the street. Do you think he should have been arrested?

PH: Yes. And then hopefully get treatment. I think that we should look at the tools we have around involuntary confinement in our community. Because it’s not just him who’s in crisis, he’s creating a crisis for the community. We have more and more people who are really affecting our community negatively and also hurting themselves or cannot make healthy decisions to be in community.

ECB: In District 4, particularly along and adjacent to Leary Way, businesses have illegally placed hundreds of concrete “eco-blocks” in public parking areas to prevent people living in RVs from parking there. Do you see this as a problem, and if not, why not?

PH: Eco-blocks are an issue. But they are way down the list compared to the bigger issues that we have in our community. And they are a desperate last response from somebody that recognizes that [RVs] affect the ability of their neighbors or their clients to park in the area. They are a desperate plea for help. The city [should say], ‘Okay, wherever the eco-blocks are, that’s we’re going to put the most amount of our attention, because that’s where the most issues are popping up.’

ECB: The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has experienced a number of major setbacks recently, including the end of the Partnership for Zero program downtown and the departure of its founding CEO. Do you believe the KCRHA can be successful, and if so, what are some steps you would take as a council member to get the agency back on the right track?

PH: I feel very strongly that we need to continue to support [the KCRHA]. I think it is the right approach, to look at it regionally. Standing up a new agency is hard, especially in a culture right now where we have such distrust of any kind of institution. But the piece I think is most important is that the city of Seattle’s putting in plenty of money. It’s the other cities that aren’t putting enough money in, if any, and that’s bullshit. And if there’s anything that the council can do, it is to say ‘bullshit’ to all those other cities. Step up, put the money in, because if they did, then we would have more resources to work with.

I’m also so thankful that the state took up housing [by passing legislation to allow more housing statewide] last year, because Seattle took on more of the growth than we should have. The growth should have been more regional. The other cities had a responsibility to allow for more density in their cities, and finally, this is putting some pressure on them as well.

ECB: You’re saying that every community in the state could use more housing. But people are moving to Seattle no matter what. Do you support adding more density in the city’s comprehensive plan, and what do you think of the unofficial Option 6, which would add more housing everywhere?

PH: I do support more density everywhere, because we all have a shared responsibility accept more of the change and growth. And the more we try to limit it to certain areas, the more the forced tension happens, when we could actually say, okay, we all are going to accommodate far more growth. That way, one community isn’t affected at such a high rate.

The reason the districts changed so drastically [in the recent redistricting process] was because in District 7, South Lake Union and downtown grew precipitously faster than anything else. So D7 had to shrink, and D4 and D3 shrunk. And so I’m concerned that if we don’t spread that out, we’ll start creating these different cultural neighborhoods in a way that we’ve never had before, where the people who live there, the way they view how government should be responsive is so different. And you know, Seattle is young right now—our median age is 35—and we have, just barely, a majority of renters. That’s not bad, it’s just new. It means that our city needs to be reflective and responsive to change.

ECB: Do we need a new progressive tax in the city to fund some of the stuff that we’re talking about, like more housing in Seattle?

PH: We have a lot of continuations of initiatives and levies that are okay. I’m supportive of the housing levy that will be on the ballot this year. Next year will be the renewal of the Move [Seattle] levy. I don’t think that currently, we are in a place where we should be looking at more taxes.

ECB: The mayor has put a lot of attention downtown. As a Fremont neighborhood advocate, do you feel like the city is neglecting other neighborhoods?

PH: Mayor [Ed] Murray tried to kill the neighborhood councils. Guess what? It didn’t work. They’re still vibrant. But where we let down our communities is that he took away those liaisons from the Department of Neighborhoods who went to the meetings. We need to restore those. We can do that while also not taking away attention from downtown.

Murray said the neighborhood councils were not reflective of the community as a whole. And he was right. They were primarily white retirees, older folks, homeowners. As someone who was on the board of the Fremont Neighborhood Council back when I was a renter, in my late 20s, we have always struggled with that. This is something where all our neighborhood groups struggle. How do we encourage more participation? Are there other groups that we can also add to this table? I feel very strongly that we need to revitalize that put and put more energy into it.

By Erica C. Barnett

The 2023 election will dramatically reshape the Seattle City Council. Four council members are not seeking reelection, while a fifth, Teresa Mosqueda, is running for King County Council and will be replaced by an appointee if she wins. Even if all three of the incumbents who are running win reelection, the council will probably have at least five new members next year—a new majority of freshmen on a council whose most experienced members will, at most, be entering their second terms. If all eight seats turn over, it would make Sara Nelson, an at-large council member who started her first term last year, the most senior member of the council.

Debates over issues and ideology are understandably front and center in campaigns. But with eight of nine council seats up for grabs, I want to focus for a moment on an often overlooked question that impacts how the city council makes decisions and functions on a daily basis:  Can these people work together? Among the current council, the answer is frequently no. At best, there’s a sense that council members aren’t talking to each other outside public meetings, which are still largely virtual. At worst, the hostility bursts out into the open—as it has during this election, when one council member, Sara Nelson, is actively campaigning against three of her incumbent colleagues.

In this setting, five—and up to eight—new council members could provide a needed reset and eliminate some of the bad blood that has built up over the past several years.

Less optimistically, an inexperienced council could leave Mayor Bruce Harrell’s exercise of executive power unchecked, allowing the mayor to push through any number of priorities that the current council has shot down—like raiding the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to be spend on housing and equitable development, to pay for general city obligations.

The next council will have to get up to speed fast, because they’ll soon face challenges that are only growing in scope—from homelessness, gun violence, and addiction to a looming $250 million budget deficit that will require tough decisions and could mean significant service cuts.

To get a better sense of how council incumbents, challengers, and first-time candidates would tackle these challenges, PubliCola spoke with 10 of the 14 council candidates, representing every council district.

Two candidates—Rob Saka in District 1 and Tanya Woo in District 2—ignored our emailed requests to sit down for an interview and did not follow up after I asked again in person. One candidate, District 3’s Joy Hollingsworth, set up an interview but then canceled, and did not respond to my request to reschedule. Maritza Rivera, running in District 4, would not sit down for an interview but did provide emailed responses to written questions. And Cathy Moore, in District 5, declined my request in an email.

The number of candidates who declined, canceled, or ignored our requests for an interview is unusual. While PubliCola isn’t shy about expressing our views on issues, that has rarely been an impediment to dialogue in the past. These candidates’ refusal to sit down for an in-depth conversation about the issues they will have to address if elected could bode poorly for transparency on the new council; in our experience, candidates who refuse to talk to members of the press they perceive as critical rarely become more tolerant of tough questions under the pressure of public office.

I’ll be rolling out interviews with the council candidates in every race over the next two weeks. I hope readers will learn more about the candidates from these in-depth conversations and use them to inform your vote. Ballots go out on October 18.

Today’s interview is with ChrisTiana ObeySumner, a social equity consultant who has worked as a housing navigator at Harborview Medical Center and as a counselor and case manager for the Downtown Emergency Services Center and Compass Housing Alliance; they also served as co-chair of the city’s Disability Commission and Renters’ Commission. ObeySumner is running to represent North Seattle in Council District 5.

PubliCola [ECB]: You worked as a housing navigator at Harborview, which involved securing permanent supportive housing for people who needed it. Can you talk a bit about what you learned from that experience and how that work would inform your approach to housing and homelessness if you’re elected?

ChrisTiana ObeySumner [CO]: When I was at Harborview, my role was grant-funded from a federal grant. And there were certain requirements of the grant in order to continue the funding. One of them was, we had to essentially do a landlord partnership style program with around 50 landlords. So we spent all this energy and time either trying to talk with the grant funder or find some way around how we could fulfill that grant requirements so that we could stay in compliance.

But the issue wasn’t necessarily having partnerships with the landlords. The issue was all these other things people didn’t have, like documents to get their IDs. A lot of my clients who were working, they were working either second or third shift, so there was no shelter space available for them. They may have a disability or a medical condition where living with roommates was not ideal or would not be a perfect solution. Or they had a partner and children where it was really hard for them to find a two- or three- bedroom apartment, even if they did otherwise have the means. There was one person I remember back in 2016 or ‘17 who needed something like $7,500 just for the moving fee alone. And again, we can help him with that, but the thing is, this is going to drain all the savings, and the second month is only going to be 30 days away.

Those were the areas that we needed to focus on. But in order for me to be able to even be there to focus on it, we had to fulfill these grant requirements. It had nothing to do with what’s happening on the ground. And it was really frustrating to feel like I was always having to fight and advocate and get in trouble to do my job.

ECB: The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has seen a lot of setbacks, including the departure of former CEO Marc Dones and the recent decision to shut down the Partnership for Zero program aimed at ending homelessness downtown. Do you think the KCRHA can still be successful, and what would you do as a councilmember to help it succeed?

CO: They’re being funded to serve maybe five to 15 percent of those would otherwise be qualified [for shelter and services], which makes a dent. But if you have a credit card debt, and you’re only paying five to 15 percent of the principal, not even the interest, then you’re never going to be making progress. On top of this, there is a chronic issue of the folks working in industries that make our cities run being woefully underfunded and woefully underpaid, and also having to use the same resources at the clients. I remember, I had to get a conflict of interest waiver because I had to take a client to DSHS, and their case manager at DSHS was the same as mine, because made so little money working full time I qualified for food stamps.

When you really look at the scale of the issue, and you look at what their proposed budget is, whether it’s the KCRHA or the state, it’s still shoestring, and it’s usually for a limited amount of time. And the onus gets put on the folks who have this limited budget and whose staff are underpaid and overworked. I wonder what would happen if we looked at what has been the most successful project, whether it’s KCRHA, LEAD, whatever, and just brought it to scale?

ECB: The initial version of the KCRHA’s Five Year Plan came out and they said it would cost $12 billion. And everybody flipped out and said, ‘Well, we certainly can’t do that.’ So let’s just instead keep doing the same thing we were doing before with no increase beyond inflation. So what do you see as the solution—is it passing more local taxes? Is it just trying to incrementally improve the budgets?

CO: I feel like we’re in that space where we’re sort of trying to pay off our credit card with a credit card. We look at these different budget decisions or plans as these discrete things. People talk about the Comprehensive Plan. And then we’re going talk about the Move [Seattle] Levy. And then we’re going to talk about social housing. And then we’re going to talk about the Green New Deal. But they’re all connected, at the end of the day, to the [same] shared goal. We need to make sure that we have affordable, accessible, sustainable housing that is near that’s transit and pedestrian-focused.

[I was talking] at a forum about sustainable development, and I said it would be great to have a building where the apartment is over a preschool, it has a green space, it’s near transit, and it has a retail space for folks who own small businesses to be inside. And someone was like, ‘Can you give an example of what we have [like that] already?’ and I sent him the example of [Roberto Maestas Plaza at] El Centro de la Raza. And they’re like, ‘It’s $45 million. That’s not scalable.’ And I was like, well, the transit levy can pay for the transit part of it, and the Green New Deal can help pay for the eco-village part of it. And then I agree with [the list of potential taxes[ the progressive revenue stabilization task force came up with. I support all nine of the suggestions. I definitely think we need a capital gains tax in the city. I think that is also going to lead to a CEO [pay disparity] tax [and an] increase in JumpStart taxes.

And we really have to talk about the fact that the reason why we have the most regressive tax structure in the country is because of a [state] constitution that says we can only have equal taxation [regardless of income]. And if we don’t change it, it’s never going to be progressive. [The impact of] a 1 percent income tax for someone making $400,000 versus someone making $18,000 is a huge difference. And so everyone’s like, ‘You’re only running for one district in the city, ChrisTiana, are you saying you’re going go up to the state of argue but constitutional law?’ Yes. Yes. Because if my job is, how do we get progressive revenue, my responsibility shouldn’t end at my purview. That’s why we need folks who are going to be able and willing and coming with a network of folks in different jurisdictions. And unless we are willing to fight the systemic inequity, we’re just playing, and I’m not running for office to play.

ECB: What are some of your top priorities for ensuring that police are held accountable for misconduct, and how would you address the fact that the city is unable to hire the number of police many elected officials say they need? How would you start transitioning away from that police-centric model of public safety?

CO: You could add more people or more money. Or you could say, Why don’t we just make sure that we can streamline your purview to what your core job and focus is, and not rely on you for every single thing, since you’re already stressed out? And so you decide what team or department should be created, based on moving these responsibilities out of [SPD’s] purview, you look at the cost of previous team doing that service and start there for budgetary allocation, and then you continue to monitor progress. And from there, you also make sure there’s accountability so that this team that’s been in this hurricane of sorts can get back on track in terms of accountability to themselves, to their job, to the people they serve.

SPD has been saying, for who knows how long, that we have been asking them to do things that they feel is out of their purview. They’re like, ‘We’re not social workers’. And we don’t have the police officers. The entire industry of policing has been having an issue with recruiting and retaining officers since 2018. So really, whether you are someone who wants no police or whether you’re someone who wants more police, we should have a shared understanding that the police are doing much more today than they used to.

And now we just passed this drug ordinance, which is asking SPD, again, to do more things when they are already saying that they’re overburdened, overworked, overloaded and working out of purview. So what I’m wanting to do is go to them and be like, ‘Do you really want to, one, be accountable for more stuff you don’t want to do, that we can easily move over to someone else who does and is more successful at it? And it’s going to help actually increase community safety, because we know that the empirical data shows that just having more police doesn’t lead to increased community safety.

ECB: I think the mayor would say yes to everything you said. And then I think he’d say, look, I created this great new department that will do just that.

CO: Bruce is one of those people that I think really wants to show his constituents with that he’s [quotation fingers] ‘doing a thing.’ And I think he feels like shiny and new is better than tested and true. And that’s not the case. And especially when you start something new, there is so much foundational work that’s needed to fund it, to structure it, to staff it, to pilot it. We have organizations in the city that have been making progress with shoestring budgets. I would advocate for Bruce to get to know those organizations and partner with them in a way where he can know enough about the work and the progress that they’ve done to fund that and not always want to create some shiny new thing.

Because really, what we need our mayor to do right now is to help reconstruct this narrative that everything is just this huge hot mess at the bottom of a dumpster fire in the middle of a shit show. And that there are opportunities, there is hope, there is a pathway forward that can lead to progress. And that’s not going to be overnight. So if we don’t do that, and we’re always just looking for whatever quick fix or shiny new toy we have, we’re never going to move forward.

ECB: The lack of sidewalks in District 5 is a perennial problem that candidates in this district always bring up. What are some other issues specific to District 5 that you would prioritize?

CO: One of my first jobs was at Walgreens. There’s a Walgreen’s across from where I used to live on 145th at Northgate, and they have pretty significant natural haircare aisles. The reason why that is important is because I know from working at Walgreen’s that you’re not going to stock products can’t move. It shows that we’re here. And especially since 2020, there’s been more supportive housing, more tiny home villages, more Seattle Housing Authority housing, more folks who are immigrant and refugees, more folks who are renters, more folks who are students. I’ve been living here in District 5 the entire time I’ve been in Seattle, since 2010.

People think that the majority demographic are these rich white homeowners. I think they’re the loudest. And these are the people who have the time and privilege to go down to City Hall at 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon and give a two-minute public comment about something when other folks have work or childcare or something else they have to do to survive. And I really feel like whether it’s sidewalks or anything else that takes investment, we need someone who knows what it’s like to not be that demographic in this district. So yes, we need sidewalks, but I think the [lack of] sidewalks is a product of this deeper issue of North Seattle being seen as the ‘burbs.

We need to make sure that we’re actually investing in having a thriving economy. If you want to have a 15-minute, walkable city that should mean everywhere, including up here. We need to make sure that we do have the infrastructure, because there really is flooding and damage and sewer issues and electricity issues.

ECB: In covering city hall over the years, I’ve noticed that there are eras when the city is focused on neighborhoods and eras when downtown takes priority. Right now, we’re obviously in a part of that cycle where the mayor is hyper-focused on downtown. What would you do to pull some of that focus to District 5?

CO: My question to Bruce about focusing on downtown is unless you’re completely forsaking anyone who isn’t a tourist, where do you think we can get the money to come downtown and spend it. If I have a business in District5, and I’m not getting the support as a small business owner, or having affordable rents, or having affordable grocery stores, or I have to spend more money to travel further to be able to get to the services I need, I’m not gonna have the money to go downtown and spend it on some fancy restaurant or go up in the Space Needle, or whatever it is. So we really have to look at the whole system, not just hyper-focus on what’s going to make the best photo. There’s a disparity here. This has been swept under the rug and someone has to talk about it.

By Erica C. Barnett

The 2023 election will dramatically reshape the Seattle City Council. Four council members are not seeking reelection, while a fifth, Teresa Mosqueda, is running for King County Council and will be replaced by an appointee if she wins. Even if all three of the incumbents who are running win reelection, the council will probably have at least five new members next year—a new majority of freshmen on a council whose most experienced members will, at most, be entering their second terms. If all eight seats turn over, it would make Sara Nelson, an at-large council member who started her first term last year, the most senior member of the council.

Debates over issues and ideology are understandably front and center in campaigns. But with eight of nine council seats up for grabs, I want to focus for a moment on an often overlooked question that impacts how the city council makes decisions and functions on a daily basis:  Can these people work together? Among the current council, the answer is frequently no. At best, there’s a sense that council members aren’t talking to each other outside public meetings, which are still largely virtual. At worst, the hostility bursts out into the open—as it has during this election, when one council member, Sara Nelson, is actively campaigning against three of her incumbent colleagues.

In this setting, five—and up to eight—new council members could provide a needed reset and eliminate some of the bad blood that has built up over the past several years.

Less optimistically, an inexperienced council could leave Mayor Bruce Harrell’s exercise of executive power unchecked, allowing the mayor to push through any number of priorities that the current council has shot down—like raiding the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to be spend on housing and equitable development, to pay for general city obligations.

The next council will have to get up to speed fast, because they’ll soon face challenges that are only growing in scope—from homelessness, gun violence, and addiction to a looming $250 million budget deficit that will require tough decisions and could mean significant service cuts.

To get a better sense of how council incumbents, challengers, and first-time candidates would tackle these challenges, PubliCola spoke with 10 of the 14 council candidates, representing every council district.

Two candidates—Rob Saka in District 1 and Tanya Woo in District 2—ignored our emailed requests to sit down for an interview and did not follow up after I asked again in person. One candidate, District 3’s Joy Hollingsworth, set up an interview but then canceled, and did not respond to my request to reschedule. Maritza Rivera, running in District 4, would not sit down for an interview but did provide emailed responses to written questions. And Cathy Moore, in District 5, declined my request in an email.

The number of candidates who declined, canceled, or ignored our requests for an interview is unusual. While PubliCola isn’t shy about expressing our views on issues, that has rarely been an impediment to dialogue in the past. These candidates’ refusal to sit down for an in-depth conversation about the issues they will have to address if elected could bode poorly for transparency on the new council; in our experience, candidates who refuse to talk to members of the press they perceive as critical rarely become more tolerant of tough questions under the pressure of public office.

I’ll be rolling out interviews with the council candidates in every race over the next two weeks. I hope readers will learn more about the candidates from these in-depth conversations and use them to inform your vote. Ballots go out on October 18.

Today’s interview is with Ron Davis, who’s running to represent Northeast Seattle in District 3. Davis is an attorney, tech consultant, and housing activist who touts his working-class roots when talking about the need to build more housing and fix the state’s regressive tax system, which forces cities to rely heavily on taxes that disproportionately impact poor and working-class people.

PubliCola [ECB] Your opponent, Maritza Rivera, has accused you of flip-flopping on the recent legislation that empowered the city attorney to prosecute people for public drug use, based on the fact that you deleted a tweet that said you supported prosecuting drug dealers. What is your position on the law, particularly when it comes to prosecuting people who sell drugs?

Ron Davis [RD]: I sent out a email with a multipoint plan, and then I tried to summarize it on Twitter in six points. Two of the points involved enforcement. The fourth said something about dealers and people who are a risk of harm to others who are, presumably, arrested under the ordinance. And I used the word ‘prosecute.’ And then I sat down with some retired judges, and people in the criminal legal system space. I sat down with [Purpose Dignity Action co-director] Lisa Daugaard, and I said ‘You’ve got a better understanding of what’s happening on the ground, both in terms of the plans of the Harrell administration and what the evidence shows.’

And so what I came to see, and clarify, is that in many of these cases, people who are dealing on the street are [dealing at a] subsistence level and they’re folks struggling with addiction themselves. And it turns out that the remedy for them is the same as in any other case, which is to get them into recovery resources. So I said something like, ‘The answer is diversion, services and, housing.’ And Maritza was like, ‘Ron Davis wants to subsidize drug dealers.’ And then the Seattle Times said, ‘Ron Davis does not support any enforcement ordinance whatsoever.’ Diversion does not imply zero enforcement. I did write to them and say, ‘You’re entitled to call me an extremist, but you are not entitled to your own facts.’

ECB: Where do you stand on the ordinance?

RD: I’ve been asked many times how I would have voted. And my answer is this: After talking to [a variety of] people, I got a really conflicting picture that emerged about what the past practice was in the last 10 years. There are some people who insist that the past practice was that post-arrest, people who were really struggling with addiction were not incarcerated, and we can’t even book people for that. And then there’s another set of people who are saying, that’s ostensibly true, but they tend to have other things on their record that you can book for, and we are using that as a front door into incarceration.

So there was an empirical question I could not get a straight answer to, and I don’t have staff and I don’t have access to city data. So when I’ve gotten like the ‘yes/no/maybe’ surveys, I’ve said ‘maybe.’ Critics say it will reignite the drug war, and boosters say it’s a path into treatment. And I think what is really true is that we don’t have a lot of capacity in either jails or treatment. And so, it will depend on execution and what do we actually fund in the future.

ECB: The mayor’s most recent budget proposal doesn’t increase ongoing funding for treatment or services. Are there specific programs you would push for if you were on the council during this budget cycle?

RD: When I think about where we can get the most bang for our buck, it’s things like LEAD and CoLEAD, plus supportive housing for folks in that process, because there’s a number of folks who get into some of those recovery services and if they don’t get stable housing, they don’t recover. Evergreen Treatment Services has a mobile buprenorphine treatment unit, and I think expanding that low-barrier access is one of the best evidence-based ways to get people into what is now clinically called recovery, right, which is a many-step process.

ECB: The city is facing a budget shortfall of up to $250 million starting with the 2025 budget, which the council will take up next year. Even if the city passes new progressive taxes, the revenues may not be available that quickly and they probably won’t completely close the gap. What areas of the budget will you prioritize for cuts?

RD: I will say, I think expansion of Jumpstart, which has already passed the courts, topping off the progressive tax on extreme capital gains, could generate the revenue in a timely enough fashion.

Look, I was a CEO—I got teased by my investors about squeezing a buck. I do think we need to be smart. But I also think we need to acknowledge that right now, we are spending less as a percentage of GDP at the state local level than we were 10 years ago. So when you get these b.s. statistics that are like ‘Spending is going up faster than inflation’—number one, the cost of doing business when you’re a government is not tied directly to regular inflation, because it’s mostly labor-intensive and land-intensive and construction-intensive. In the private and public sector, those exceed inflation. But number two, any government economist who made it pass their sophomore year can tell you that the way we measure government spending, and if we’re spending a lot or a little, is as a percentage of GDP, and that’s gone down in the last 10 years.

Now, for most of us, that’s not true, because we have a regressive tax system that always, always, always takes from working class folks or little old ladies on fixed incomes, in big houses that are technically worth a lot, but they have no cash. And I do think that means we need to fix our tax system. And, you know, we don’t have to kill the golden goose. We could be the go from the being the [most] regressive state to the [third]. We could rebalance the tax code just a little bit to be, like, remotely in line with Democratic Party values. And I don’t know that we can fix everything, but we can make massive, massive difference in these problems.

ECB: One place the city never wants to cut is the police department—even after getting rid of 80 vacant positions last year, the city continues to fund vacant, unfillable positions and allow the department to use that extra money for overtime as well as other new programs, like Shotspotter and camera surveillance, which are both in this year’s budget. Do you support cutting the police budget?

RD: [Shotspotter] is a great example of one of those places where the evidence is really clear that it doesn’t work. And so it seems like a great, great example of actually throwing money away. If there’s technology we can use to reduce crime or make policing more efficient, without violating people’s civil rights, but I haven’t seen it.

I don’t know how ‘ghost’ positions there are. But as I’ve said in the past, I think false promises are a bad idea. And I think when you build a budget around a staffing plan that is literally impossible, it would be just like me building an affordable housing plan around reducing the price of lumber and interest rates. So I say this often, but I want to say it again. Eighty-five percent of jurisdictions in Washington state are below their [police] hiring targets. Everett, Tacoma, Olympia, and Bellevue have all described themselves as at crisis levels. Memphis, Atlanta, Tulsa are, as a percentage, off [their hiring goals] ] almost as much as SPD. And this is a national, structural problem where hundreds of thousands of people left the profession. So I think any budget or plan that is selling people safety based on doing magic is policy malpractice, and it’s dishonest with voters.

ECB: Seattle Police Department officers have repeatedly been caught mocking or belittling the deaths of people killed by police—most recently SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer, who was caught on tape joking with SPOG president Mike Solan about the killing of Jaahnavi Kandula by a third officer. Do you think SPD can be reformed, and if so, how?

RD: For me, reforming the culture means reforming the governance. Right now, the culture is one where impunity is allowed, because there’s no genuine independent oversight and accountability. And without that, I don’t know why we would think we would stop having a culture of impunity. We’ve been under a consent decree for 10 years because of that culture of impunity and lack of accountability.

I think that whether it’s OPA or whatever body [is in charge of investigating police misconduct], it needs to be fully civilianized. And they may need to have subpoena power or disciplinary power, extending all the way to firing for cause and putting that on someone’s record. I do think there’s things like Before the Badge, de-escalation training, community policing, that are evidence-based ways to nibble around the edges and improve things, but we’re not going to persuade people to be nice at this point. That’s not working. We’ve been trying that for a long, long, long time.

I also think that will build community confidence that officers who step out of line are going to be accountable for it. And building that community confidence might even make the department a more attractive place to work and more reflective of the community. But given the fact that we’re the department that sent the most officers to the January 6 insurrection, right now we’ve got a department that’s really out of step with the community.

ECB: The city is seeking to have the Supreme Court review a Ninth Circuit panel decision on homelessness involving a sleeping ban in Grants Pass, Oregon. If the court overturns the ruling, it could mean the end of Martin v. Boise, another ruling that says that in the Western states, jurisdictions can’t ban unsheltered people from sleeping in public unless the jurisdiction offers adequate shelter. What do you think the implication will be if Martin v. Boise is overturned?

RD: I don’t know if Martin v. Boise is holding back us a whole lot. We are not allowed to sweep people, in the sense that we cannot clear encampments without either some very, very specific circumstances or offering housing. And often what we call offering housing, I would say we ostensibly offer housing— where we walk into an encampment and we’re offering congregate shelter. I don’t think qualifies for number of reasons. And we’re offering an amount of congregate shelter capacity that does not match the size of the encampment anyway, because we know people will say no, and using it as a pretext for sweeping.

You know, when we do the relationship building, we do the work, and we offer actual, real, viable alternatives, people are very responsive. But we have constraints in terms of how much of that we have available.

ECB: You’ve said many times that you support Option 6 for the upcoming update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan—an alternative put forward by pro-housing activists that would add more density, in more parts of the city, than the most housing-forward official comp plan option, Option 5 How likely do you think it is that Option 6, or elements of Option 6, move forward?

RD:  I think it really depends on who gets on the council. I know that there’s at least one person in almost every race who feels pretty strongly that that’s where we should go. So it will really depend on the composition of the council. I also think that the definition of what [Option] 5 is will have the potential to evolve.

What is really important to me is that our comp plan, one, does not make the housing deficit worse, which currently all the options do. Two, actually chips away at or solves the housing deficit. And then three, does so in a broadly spread way that allows us to do things like have reasonable lot coverage requirements, so that we have nice things like trees. And there’s other pieces of it that I want to see that are also essential, that aren’t necessarily have to be comp plan driven, like complete neighborhoods where people meet most of their needs in their neighborhood on foot, with accessible infrastructure. We can do that through the various transportation levies, but I’d like to see that in the comp plan, too.

ECB: If you win, you’ll be a newcomer in a council full of newcomers. What are your biggest knowledge gaps, and where would you turn to fill those gaps?

RD: Although I enjoy incredible support in the labor community, and I have aligned values, I am not an expert in labor relations. I see [Councilmember] Teresa Mosqueda as the model legislator when it comes thinking carefully about labor legislation and working closely with that community, while still having an open dialogue with the business community. Another area where I would really like to increase my knowledge is around utilities. And [former council member] Mike O’Brien was the chair of that committee, and he’s a mentor. On issues of racial equity, I’m constantly learning, and I know that I’m likely to bring in kind of notable blind spots, just based on my own lived experience. Somebody I really respect in that space is[46th District state Rep.] Darya Farivar, who is one of my endorsers.

By Erica C. Barnett

The 2023 election will dramatically reshape the Seattle City Council. Four council members are not seeking reelection, while a fifth, Teresa Mosqueda, is running for King County Council and will be replaced by an appointee if she wins. Even if all three of the incumbents who are running win reelection, the council will probably have at least five new members next year—a new majority of freshmen on a council whose most experienced members will, at most, be entering their second terms. If all eight seats turn over, it would make Sara Nelson, an at-large council member who started her first term last year, the most senior member of the council.

Debates over issues and ideology are understandably front and center in campaigns. But with eight of nine council seats up for grabs, I want to focus for a moment on an often overlooked question that impacts how the city council makes decisions and functions on a daily basis:  Can these people work together? Among the current council, the answer is frequently no. At best, there’s a sense that council members aren’t talking to each other outside public meetings, which are still largely virtual. At worst, the hostility bursts out into the open—as it has during this election, when one council member, Sara Nelson, is actively campaigning against three of her incumbent colleagues.

In this setting, five—and up to eight—new council members could provide a needed reset and eliminate some of the bad blood that has built up over the past several years.

Less optimistically, an inexperienced council could leave Mayor Bruce Harrell’s exercise of executive power unchecked, allowing the mayor to push through any number of priorities that the current council has shot down—like raiding the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to be spend on housing and equitable development, to pay for general city obligations.

The next council will have to get up to speed fast, because they’ll soon face challenges that are only growing in scope—from homelessness, gun violence, and addiction to a looming $250 million budget deficit that will require tough decisions and could mean significant service cuts.

To get a better sense of how council incumbents, challengers, and first-time candidates would tackle these challenges, PubliCola spoke with 10 of the 14 council candidates, representing every council district.

Two candidates—Rob Saka in District 1 and Tanya Woo in District 2—ignored our emailed requests to sit down for an interview and did not follow up after I asked again in person. One candidate, District 3’s Joy Hollingsworth, set up an interview but then canceled, and did not respond to my request to reschedule. Maritza Rivera, running in District 4, would not sit down for an interview but did provide emailed responses to written questions. And Cathy Moore, in District 5, declined my request in an email.

The number of candidates who declined, canceled, or ignored our requests for an interview is unusual. While PubliCola isn’t shy about expressing our views on issues, that has rarely been an impediment to dialogue in the past. These candidates’ refusal to sit down for an in-depth conversation about the issues they will have to address if elected could bode poorly for transparency on the new council; in our experience, candidates who refuse to talk to members of the press they perceive as critical rarely become more tolerant of tough questions under the pressure of public office.

I’ll be rolling out interviews with the council candidates in every race over the next two weeks. I hope readers will learn more about the candidates from these in-depth conversations and use them to inform your vote. Ballots go out on October 18.

Today’s interview is with Alex Hudson, who’s running to represent Capitol Hill, the Central District, and other central Seattle neighborhoods in District 3. Hudson is the former executive director of the Transportation Choices Coalition and former director of the First Hill Improvement Association.

PubliCola [ECB]: Seattle Police Department officers have repeatedly been caught mocking or belittling the deaths of people killed by police—most recently SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer, who was caught on tape joking with SPOG president Mike Solan about the killing of Jaahnavi Kandula by a third officer. Do you think SPD can be reformed, and if so, how?

Alex Hudson [AH]: I sure hope so. I absolutely, deeply hope that our police force can be reformed. And we need to do everything we can to do that. We need to make it so that [the Office of Police Accountability] doesn’t have a huge majority of police officers on it. This should be a community-led thing. Police policing [other] police doesn’t work. And it contributes to a culture where we have police officers with strong leadership positions in their union who have cost the taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees.

I think that we should take accountability out of the contract. That’s not a working condition. That is a basic oversight condition that all other employees of the city have. So it’s just making the police just like anybody else, so that we can hold the bad ones accountable, and then start getting different kinds of police officers in there.

The recruiting question also comes up all the time. And I think to myself, we don’t have a problem recruiting police officers because of the tone of the city council, we have an issue of recruiting police officers because—who would want those people to be their colleagues? You look at the situation with the with the tombstone, or the Trump flag, or the recent statements about not valuing human life, and why would you want to have those people be your colleagues? So we need to reform our police department in order to be able to recruit.

And I think part of that is that of the stuff that we like to ask the police to do, they shouldn’t do. Police officers don’t need to be directing overflow traffic at major events, and I would assert that police officers don’t necessarily need to show up at every theft. If your house gets robbed, the police officers are not coming with a detective who’s going to go track down your television. You’re looking for somebody who’s going to give you a report, so you can take it to your insurance company. Why does a police officer need to do that? And so I think that as we limit their scope of responsibilities, you also will have police officers who are less likely to be thinking about everyone as a as a potential criminal.

ECB: The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has seen a lot of setbacks, including the departure of former CEO Marc Dones and the recent decision to shut down the Partnership for Zero program aimed at ending homelessness downtown. Do you think the KCRHA can still be successful, and what would you do as a councilmember to help it succeed?

AH: It can’t work unless all the cities who are under its jurisdiction come to the table—if it’s just Seattle and King County. It can’t work if cities like Burien behave the way that they are around this issue. I think it has to work, because homelessness is a regional issue. And so I think the way that we do that is we start taking a look at policies that the builders’ remedy [which allows housing developers to bypass restrictive zoning codes if they build affordable housing] in California—like, if you’re not providing a certain kind of shelter and services for homeless people in your city, and your body politic isn’t willing to do that, then we’re going to step in and make it be that way.

We have clear examples of municipalities in King County that have these issues and are refusing to do the thing that’s necessary to address them—why did they get to refuse? So I think that that would bring those municipalities into better compliance onto the side of solving problems, not creating them, and make it so that there was a little bit less ability to opt out.

ECB: The city council recently voted to empower the city attorney to prosecute drug users. You’ve said you would have voted ‘no’ on that proposal. Can you talk a bit about why?

AH: Drug addiction is a medical issue. Even if you were a jail-as-a-solution person, that’s not an option that even exists. And the resources aren’t there for the options that we knew do help people. This is an underfunded idea that feels like more of the thing that the city is constantly doing, which is saying sort of the right things and putting no actual resources behind it. And so what is going to happen is that we are just going to keep people in this vicious cycle.

My 14-year-old, when we were walking home three days ago, told me that she thinks that the grocery store is scary. And that’s not acceptable for anybody. And it’s most certainly not acceptable for the people who are suffering tremendously and miserably from a medical issue that no one is coming with real solutions for at all. The lack of scalability, the lack of urgency on this—it’s shameful. And I don’t think that allowing our city attorney to prosecute people does anything to make it so that people whose situation in life has found them smoking fentanyl on Third Avenue get better. And what everyone in this city wants is for people to be able to get better. They want it to be real. So I don’t see that this bill does that. And I just strongly, strongly, strongly [prefer to] follow the overwhelming evidence from every medical institution in the world. It’s very clear that drug addiction is a public health crisis, not a criminal justice problem.

ECB: There is a lot of discussion about treatment and diversion in the bill, but no actual new resources for treatment or diversion. What kind of programs would you like to see the city actually fund?

AH: I identify as somebody who is a survivor of addiction myself, and what made it so that I could find those steps to a better life was having a life worth living, and having some support to do that. I live a block away from a methadone clinic. And that is an important community resource that serves our community. But I don’t see why people should have to taxi in from Kent every single day, or how that in any way helps them put their lives back together. So we need to have the medically assisted treatment be more available where people are.

The mobile unit is a good start. We need to have way more of those overdose recovery centers, we need to have way more things like Peer Washington, which is this really incredible nonprofit organization that pairs people up—like having a sponsor outside of the [Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous] structure. We need to have a whole lot more housing and shelter, we need to have workforce development, we need to have actual counseling. Homelessness is a severe form of trauma, and drug addiction is a symptom, usually, of some other very deep, underlying trauma—and the things that people are forced to do in order to survive while in the active throes of their addiction are very traumatizing.

And I think what we need to do is we need to pass a municipal capital gains tax and bring tens of millions of dollars on an annual basis into creating those solutions—real things, not just stuff that feels good. Art therapy—no hate on the transformative power of being able to be creative—but th at’s enough. We’re not going to solve it with technology. People do not have ongoing addictions because they lack the right coloring book.

ECB: As a transportation advocate and resident of First Hill, you’ve advocated strongly against Sound Transit’s proposal—backed the mayor and the King County executive—to eliminate the planned Midtown station and to “relocate” the planned Chinatown/International District station to Pioneer Square. What would you do, as a council member, to advocate for the Sound Transit 3 plan voters actually adopted?

AH: There’s a city council seat on the Sound Transit board, and I would love the opportunity to serve my city and my district in that way. But the city [itself] has a ton of power over Sound Transit. We decide what happens around the Sound Transit station areas, we provide the connectivity and have authority over some of the right-of-way permits, and we have the ability to be able to deliver those faster and cheaper through the permitting and regulatory process.

I am the holder of the grudge about the [decision to eliminate the original] First Hill station. First Hill has done its part to create a walkable, sustainable, wonderful, affordable, and inclusive city, and deserves to have the transit service associated with that. The Midtown station should have been on First Hill—the First Hill station should have been on First Hill—and every inch that that station moves to the west is one more barrier to hardworking people at Virginia Mason and hardworking people at Swedish and hardworking people at Harborview and hardworking people who live in these neighborhoods to be able to be connected to the region.

And I understand the very real concerns that people in CID have. There is no reason in the world that anyone in the CID should trust that this is the time the transportation infrastructure is not going to have a negative impact on their community needs. I do believe that there is some potential in the [proposed new] SoDo station, depending on where it’s sited, depending on the land use, and depending on the way do the connectivity over and under the station, which can create, functionally, that hub idea that [the previously proposed] Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue stations were supposed to create.

ECB: There’s an obvious tension among the current council candidates, and even the current council, about where new housing should go and whether it’s time to abandon the old “urban village” model, which concentrates almost all of the city’s density around busy arterial streets. Would moving away from that model be a priority for you?

AH: When people talk about urban villages, I think what they mean is, like, a neighborhood commercial area. And so part of the issue in single-family neighborhoods I,s not just the lack of housing it’s the lack of anything else. I say all the time, you shouldn’t need a gallon of gas to get a gallon of milk. And so we need to absorb and allow for housing, with a minimum of sixplexes everywhere, just like we used to have. I’ve walked hundreds of miles around this district, and I can tell you that there are apartment buildings everywhere—they just aren’t legal to build anymore. And what is missing is a place where you can walk to or send your kid down to go get some ice cream and pick up a loaf of bread.

ECB: What would you prioritize, beyond electrifying buildings and cars, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city?

AH: It’s really super, super clear that the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in our city and in our state is our transportation sector. And the overwhelming evidence is also very clear that we need to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 50 percent. And the only way that you do that is by connecting people more closely to the things that they want. A corner store in your neighborhood is a climate solution. Better transit is a climate solution. The city obviously doesn’t run the transit agency. But we are a major purchaser of that service. So if we want things like the Route 8 to be a functional choice for people in this district, then the city needs to be having conversations about putting bus lanes on every arterial, about clearing the way so that our transit service can be an irresistibly good choice for people to make.

First of all, it’s just lovelier to live in a neighborhood where you can walk around. And, oh, by the way, it also makes it so that our, our planet is habitable for my grandchildren’s grandchildren. And so, to me, it is about building the kind of communities where you can close the gap between where you are and what you need and want and where you’re trying to go. And we have to create the alternatives that make it so that everyone in this isn’t forced to choose a private vehicle as their best way to get around.

ECB: The downtown waterfront is nearing completion, and people are beginning to realize that it’s not only an eyesore but essentially a new surface highway that is going to be quickly choked with cars. Is there any policy you would advocate for to fix the waterfront, or is it too late to fix it?

AH: Nothing’s ever too late. We have a million examples of repurposing right-of-way that has been car infrastructure and turning that into something beautiful for people. So I never concede that the future can’t be different than it is. I think we’re going to need to increase the connectivity and do a lot more investments in the people based infrastructure. And the reality is that we’re probably going to have to have a conversation about narrowing that roadway. I think that that will become extremely apparent when it’s finished and everyone looks around and says, ‘This isn’t really what we wanted.’ And so, yeah, we’ll have to come back to it.