Tag: Seattle City Council

City Council, Police, Uncategorized

Divided Council Passes New Police Contract That Raises Officer Pay 42 Percent, With Few Accountability Concessions
Councilmembers Sara Nelson, Debora Juarez, and Maritza Rivera confab before leaving council chambers Tuesday.

The contract, which provides $126,000 paychecks to rookie cops after 6 months, also imposes restrictions on the CARE team of unarmed first responders, prohibiting them from responding without a police escort on most calls.

By Erica C. Barnett

With three council members voting “no,” the city council approved a new contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild that gives rookie cops a starting salary of $118,000—with an automatic bump to $126,000 after just six months—with few of the new accountability requirements Seattle residents were promised in 2024, when the council approved SPOG’s most recent retroactive contract.

The 2024 contract gave cops retroactive pay increases of 23 percent; the contract adopted Tuesday, which goes through 2027, gives them additional raises of 42 percent over the next two years.

The deal, which goes through the end of 2027,still falls far short of implementing accountability legislation the city passed in 2017. That legislation called for the city’s Office of Police Accountability and Office of Inspector General to have full subpoena power when investigating misconduct (to date, they’re only allowed to subpoena public records, precluding access to things like text messages on officers’ personal phones). It also called for an end to outside arbitration, a process that allows officers to appeal disciplinary decisions to private arbitrators outside Seattle, and a lower standard of proof for misconduct allegations. None of these measures are in the contract; only one, the standard of proof, will be subject to an additional arbitration process (meaning it could still happen if the city wins its case against SPOG.)

In fact, the contract includes just two changes related to accountability. First, it simplifies a 180-day “clock” for disciplinary decisions, removing some carveouts that have contributed to very long delays between the time when someone files a misconduct complaint and when it gets resolved. Second, it allows sergeants, rather than the Office of Police Accountability, to determine discipline for “less than serious” misconduct, theoretically freeing up OPA to investigate more serious claims.

It’s unclear what will happen to cases involving professionalism and conduct unbecoming an officer, which are largely subjective; we’ve asked SPD and OPA whether a case like that of Daniel Auderer, who defended his offensive jokes about the police killing of 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula as “gallows humor,” would be dealt with internally under the new rules and never see the light of day.

“This has been part of a two year process to get here, two years for us on the [Labor Relations Policy Committee] and the Select Labor Committee. This is not a rushed process,” public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said. “One of the things I’m constantly looking at is to create a functional criminal justice—a functional public safety system. This is what we’re doing with this agreement.”

After the contract passed, SPOG President Mike Solan posted this gloating tweet.

Three council members voted against the agreement—an unprecedented number in recent years. Councilmember Rob Saka, who announced his opposition in a press release and op/ed in the Stranger, said he couldn’t support giving such large raises to police without extracting some accountability concessions.

“I have lived through encounters where the actions of an officer cross the line, where I felt fear rather than protection. I’ve experienced police brutality firsthand,” Saka said. “These moments have shaped me, and I carry them with me every single day, not with resentment or animus, but with responsibility. No person in Seattle should ever feel powerless, unseen or vulnerable to unequal justice and an encounter with law enforcement.”

Saka also noted that the huge pay increases come at an increasing cost—by 2027, an estimated budget increase of $57 million a year— at a time when the city is facing major budget deficits and federal cuts to programs that serve vulnerable people.

The newest councilmember, Eddie Lin, described an incident in his 20s when a cop in St. Paul, Minnesota “ended up putting his hands around my throat while I was handcuffed in the back of the police car and threatening me” after he refused to give up the name of a drunk and disorderly friend who had escaped arrest. After driving him around town for half an hour and “continuing to tell me how they were going to ruin my life,” the officer threw Lin in jail, where he said he stayed “for several nights.” Later, he got pulled over by the same cop and was terrified the same thing would happen again.

“There’s one harm when misconduct occurs,” Lin said. “There’s another harm, which is just as serious, when that misconduct does not get addressed. And if we really want to move toward a more positive relationship between community and the police, toward a comprehensive approach, toward public safety, accountability has to be our priority.”

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Lin also noted that the contract includes no mention of the department’s purported goal of having a recruit class that is 30 percent women by 2030. In 2025, less than 10 percent of SPD’s new hires have been women, and the department never bothered to fill a position that was supposed to help with this goal.

Alexis Mercedes Rinck also voted against the contract, saying the agreement  fails to include meaningful accountability provisions that our community has demanding, has been demanding for years. … In short, this contract asks Seattle taxpayers to invest more in policing without requiring more accountability in return, and that’s not a deal I can support.”

Under the new contract, the CARE Team, a group of social workers who respond to calls that don’t require an armed police response,,will be allowed to dispatch without police officers present, a change Mayor Bruce Harrell and many council members have touted as a significant win. (The CARE Department, which includes the 911 call center, is a part of the SPOG contract because, according to SPOG, their work impacts police officers’ working conditions and therefore must be approved by the guild.)

But as PubliCola reported in October, the deal with CARE effectively prohibits them from responding to most crisis calls, forcing them to call police instead of responding if they see any drugs or drug paraphernalia, such as foil; if the person in crisis is anywhere besides a public sidewalk or public building, such as a library; or if the person is in a homeless encampment, among a long list of restrictions.

CARE Department Chief Amy Barden told PubliCola she’s “happy that the process has concluded” and hopeful that police sergeants will voluntarily refer calls to CARE, as she said they did in 2023 and 2024. “If we return to the level of collaboration that we had for so long, then the contract will not be nearly as restrictive to the work,” Barden said.

But relying on police to voluntarily work with CARE is different than allowing CARE team members to use their judgment and discretion, Barden added. “The neighbors that I’m most interested in helping are people who are struggling with substance use and people who are unsheltered, and those two populations are named specifically in the exclusionary criteria, so that’s a problem.”

She also criticized the prohibition on responding to crises in non-public spaces, such as businesses, comparing it to a medical response. “If somebody’s having a stroke in the lobby of a business, versus a public space, it doesn’t make it not a stroke. If it’s happening in the city of Seattle, there should be a team who goes to that event regardless of location.”

The agreement resolves some grievances between the city and SPOG by cutting additional checks to cops who worked at various special events, such as Seahawks games, in the past; officers who worked at a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day event in 2022, for example, will receive double their hourly pay plus a full day of vacation, while those who worked at the Seahawks game on October 7, 2021 will get extra pay equal to 10 hours of work. The agreement also provides free parking to 19 additional civilian SPD employees, including the HR unit and a front desk staffer, who work desk jobs at police headquarters downtown—a perk most city employees do not receive.

After the three councilmembers who opposed the contract spoke, Councilmember Dan Strauss began to justify voting yes on the contract, saying it was the only way to “move accountability forward” and allow CARE to assist more people. As a group of people who had testified against the contract earlier began to boo and shout, calling Strauss “complicit in the murders” of people like Christian Nelson, who was shot and killed by SPD officers near the Othello light rail station last week, the council moved quickly to vote, curtailing further speeches. While most of the council left to meet from their offices, Lin, Strauss, and Rinck remained at the dais, their expressions ranging from pained (Rinck) to detached (Strauss) as the crowd chanted “knees off our necks,” “jail killer cops,” and “shame!”

The contract now heads to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s desk.

City Council

Third Time’s the Charm for City Council Appointee Mark Solomon

By Erica C. Barnett

After several delays to address technical problems with the A/V system in council chambers (eventually, the two council members who were attending remotely joined the meeting and voted through somebody’s cell phone, which was propped in front of a mic), the city council chose Mark Solomon to represent Southeast Seattle’s District 2—and lead the council’s land use committee—until the general election in November.

Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for the Seattle Police Department and a former intelligence officer for the US Air Force, has tried to join the council twice before. In 2019, he ran for the open District 2 seat and lost to Tammy Morales by more than 21 points. Four years later, when the council needed to fill an open seat, he tried again, but the new council already had its heart set on Tanya Woo, who had just lost to Morales the previous year. This time, it took five rounds of voting before the council chose Solomon over mayoral transportation staffer Adonis Ducksworth,

From the beginning, though, Solomon had a plurality of four (out of eight) council votes, with two other candidates—assistant city attorney Eddie Lin and Parks and Recreation employee Chukundi Salisbury—each receiving one vote in the early rounds.

Solomon, like the other candidates, pledged to address the longstanding market for drugs and stolen goods at 12th and Jackson, saying he would implement Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. CPTED is a set of strategies designed to send signals that a location is hostile to crime, such as bright lights, surveillance cameras, tall fences, and the removal of trees and bushes that people might be able to hide behind.

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As land use chair, Solomon’s job will include working on the much-delayed 2025 update to the city’s comprehensive plan, which Morales recently told PubliCola she had hoped to amend to get more housing in the Rainier Valley and to protect “neighborhood centers”—about 30 locations across the city where three-to-five story apartments would be allowed within 800 feet of frequent transit stops.

Solomon, who pledged last week to oppose removing any neighborhood centers from the comprehensive plan, hesitated when reporters asked him about that pledge and his general approach to land use shortly after he took the oath of office, then said that yes, he supports all the neighborhood centers. But, he continued, it’s important not to “concentrate” new housing, especially affordable housing, in Southeast Seattle.

“There are some neighborhoods who don’t want change, don’t want eight-story [sic] apartment buildings in their community,” Solomon said. “That’s understandable, but we are one Seattle, and Seattle needs to come together so that it’s not all concentrated on North Rainier and D2—it’s spread out. … Quite frankly, right now, D2 has a lot of density. … So when it comes to the low income housing, workforce housing, I want to spread the wealth throughout the city and not just concentrated in D2.”

Solomon also said he plans to revisit the tree ordinance, a priority of North Seattle Councilmember Cathy Moore, and to emphasize anti-displacement measures in the comprehensive plan to “ensure that we keep people in their homes [so they] have the opportunity to build generational wealth.” He also talked up the idea of a “storefront improvement fund” to pay for business improvements like lighting, better locks, and planter boxes to “bollards or planter boxes to prevent vehicles from smashing into the businesses.”

He also addressed the optics of the council appointing someone voters in District 2 rejected to represent them—first, by appointing unsuccessful D2 candidate Woo to a citywide council seat, and now by appointing him to replace Morales.

“The thing I’d like to point out to folks is, while council member Morales and I were rivals for the position, even after the election, we did work together,” Solomon said. “So for  those who may be disappointed that you know, I’m now their representative. If you don’t agree with me, fine. I’m still going to advocate for you. I’m still going to work for you. I’m still going to try to make things better by delivering services for the community.”

City Council, Elections

Six Applicants Make Their Case to Become the City Council’s Newest Member
The six city council candidates hesitate before holding up cards in response to Rob Saka’s question: “Yes or no, would you definitively rule out running this year, 2025, if appointed?”

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council is about to choose a new council member to fill Tammy Morales‘ old District 2 seat, after narrowing down the field of 20 qualified candidates to six men.

After a chaotic public forum that focused primarily on how much the applicants seat support cops, cars, and keeping Sound Transit out of Chinatown, Seattle residents got one last chance to hear from the applicants on Thursday, when each finalist delivered a prepared 3-minute speech and answered questions from all eight current council members.

But if viewers were hoping to learn more about how each of the candidates would handle the primary responsibilities that will face them over the next nine and a half months—updating the city’s comprehensive plan, overseeing the council’s land use committee, addressing ongoing budget shortfalls amid the likelihood of federal funding cuts—the council often undercut that goal. Rob Saka went on forever. Dan Strauss asked everyone where they went to middle school. Joy Hollingsworth asked, “What about the children?” And Cathy Moore requested commitments to revisit the tree code to place more restrictions on tree removal to prevent density in single-family areas.

Each council member had ten minutes to address the finalists, and most of them gave each applicant at least a minute or so for a short answer to each question. The exception was Saka, who spent more than six minutes winding up to a confusingly worded yes or no question (basically: would the candidates run for election or be a “caretaker”)? and took several more minutes to ask a second question about the comprehensive plan. As a result, the six men  had just two minutes, altogether, to explain their priorities and goals for the city’s comprehensive plan, a complex land use document that governs how and where the city will grow over the next 20 years. As Saka’s time wound down, two of his colleagues could be heard, on the Seattle Channel live stream, snickering and saying “oh my god,” respectively, and council president Sara Nelson gave them a few extra minutes so they could all say a few words.

For the record: Chukundi Salisbury and Mark Solomon, who have both previously said they would not run for election, were the only two who raised their green check mark cards.

Two quick notes: As in the public forum last Tuesday, many of the applicants’ answers were about issues or proposals the council has little or no control over, like specific Seattle Department of Transportation projects or how police officers should be deployed. To me, this suggests a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of what the council does, which has sometimes been a problem with the current council (see, for example, Saka’s frustration that he can’t just order SDOT to remove a curb that prevented him from turning left into a parking lot.)

Second, the new council member will chair the land use committee, so they ideally should have some land-use expertise; while experience as a neighborhood advocate is useful for a district council member, they’ll also be making decisions on technical issues that impact the whole city.

Finally, the fact that all six finalists are men is noteworthy, perhaps especially so because some of Morales’ colleagues and detractors dismissed her stated reasons for resigning—feeling bullied, gaslit, and excluded from important conversations—by suggesting she just wasn’t “tough” enough for the job, a common criticism of women who complain about workplace mistreatment. In modern history, there has never been another all-male panel of finalists for an open council seat.

Hong Chhuor

Nominated by: Sara Nelson

Chhour, the Chief Development and Communications Officer at Friends of the Children and co-owner of King Donuts, emphasized his ties to the immigrant and Asian American/Pacific Islander community and his commitment to improving public safety in Little Saigon. Like finalists Mark Solomon, Adonis Ducksworth, and Eddie Lin, Chhuor said his top priority on the would be to “address the travesty that is occurring at 12th and Jackson in Little Saigon.”

Quote: In response to a question from Dan Strauss about how he would “approach the dichotomy of our city need for housing and density with neighbors’ concerns that they don’t want their neighborhoods to change,” Chhour said: “I want to ask, why do we limit ourselves to that dichotomy? Could we take a moment to consider that the narrative around changing the character of our neighborhoods is a form of gatekeeping, and are we really a society in this city that wants to default to, ‘I got here first, and therefore I get to make the rules’?”

Adonis Ducksworth

Nominated by: Dan Strauss

Ducksworth, a Seattle Department of Transportation employee since 2016 (and transportation policy advisor to Mayor Bruce Harrell since 2023), talked about his experience volunteering with recovery-based groups like the Union Gospel Mission and his efforts to get a skate park in Rainier Beach, which he identified as one of his top priorities.

Quote: In his introductory comments, he said there were “five things I will be prioritizing for the district over the next 10 months, and these are things that I know can be done. Number one, address the state of emergency in the CID and Little Saigon. Number two, make Rainier Avenue safer. Number three, adopt a resolution that outlines a framework for how the city should be engaging with the community. Number four, host SPD recruiting and outreach fairs in every District Two, neighborhood. And number five, we need to give kids a different path. That’s why I want to break ground on the Rainier Beach skate park this year.”

Mark Solomon

Nominated by: Maritza Rivera

Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for the Seattle Police Department since 1990, said he would prioritize building generational wealth by promoting Black homeownership and keeping Black homeowners in their houses, noting that he can only afford to live in the city because he lives in the house his grandparents built. He also said he’s prioritize traffic safety in Southeast Seattle and building more sidewalks.

Quote: In response to a question from Rinck about what the city should to do respond to federal retaliation, such as the withdrawal of funds, against sanctuary cities like Seattle, Solomon said, “Just looking at the executive orders that have flown out of the past couple days does give me pause, and it made me think—’Okay, if you’re going to deny us money because we’re a sanctuary city, I’m going to go find my own money? I’m going to go find different sorts of funds, so I don’t have to rely on you.’ That’s one of the reasons I’ve been advocating for us to explore a public bank…. where we can set this up to borrow against our own assets to fund our own projects, so we don’t have to rely on the feds for [that] funding.”

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Chukundi Salisbury

Nominated by: Rob Saka

Salisbury, a longtime Seattle Parks Department employee and founder of the group Black Legacy Homeowners, touted his volunteer experience and emphasized his long history in Seattle. (His mother, former Community Police Commission co-chair Harriet Walden, spoke in his favor during public comment). In response to the sanctuary city question, Salisbury said he would look at “leaning in to private industry, not just taxing them, but asking them to really protect us as a sanctuary city.”

Quote: “My number one priority … would be strengthening the anti-displacement framework in the comp plan. We know that if we do not strengthen this anti-displacement framework, 20 years from now, there will not be a Black community, and many of our other BIPOC neighbors and the like who are most at risk for displacement will not exist here. And so this is one of the most important things to me. We got to be here to even work on these things.

Thaddeus Gregory

Nominated by: Joy Hollingsworth

Gregory, a land use attorney the son of Municipal Court Judge Willie Gregory, came across as the candidate with the most direct knowledge about land use. He also ticked several urbanist boxes—supporting safe bike infrastructure, supporting neighborhood corner stores (which are currently illegal), and revisiting minimum parking requirements, which can dramatically increase the cost of new housing.

Quote: In response to Moore’s litmus-test question about trees, Gregory responded: “Our tree code works to a certain extent, but sometimes more flexibility needs to be allowed. When that flexibility is there, we need to make sure that, as we develop, if any trees are taken away, we replant—twofold, threefold, fourfold. We have a goal of having a 30 percent tree canopy. It’s something that I think Seattle should absolutely aspire to and achieve. We can do it using the comprehensive plan, using the tree code. I think that we should revisit the tree code examine how we can both incentivise development and to use new development to spur more trees in our communities.”

Edward Lin

Nominated by: Alexis Mercedes Rinck

Lin, an assistant city attorney who previously worked as a private-sector land use attorney, emphasized the need to accommodate growth while preventing displacement through programs like the Equitable Development Initiative and “gentle density—duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, where somebody can age in place, and we can really build wealth within the community and not just have it go to outsiders.”

Quote: “Our schools are struggling, and educational inequality in Seattle is some of the worst in the nation. And what I’ve realized is a lot of things that happen outside our communities, whether it’s housing and homelessness or gun violence, those have huge impacts in our schools. And the [Families and Education] levy, things like kindergarten readiness, wraparound services, providing food and summer programs—those are huge ways that we can make a real difference in D2. … I’d love to lean into things like high school internships and, connecting our youth to the enormous wealth and job opportunities in our region, whether that’s the trades or tech companies or maritime industries or police.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote to Lin. We’ve replaced the quote with something Lin actually said, and we regret the error.

City Council, Elections

Council Forum Skips Past Land Use to Focus On Seward Park Drivers, Beat Cops, and “the Threat of Sound Transit”

By Erica C. Barnett

The six men selected by the Seattle City Council as finalists for the District 2 city council seat vacated by Tammy Morales last year—Hong Chhuor, Adonis Ducksworth, Thaddaeus Gregory, Edward Lin, Chukundi Salisbury, and Mark Solomon— sat down with last night for a CityClub-sponsored forum to answer questions about their qualifications and priorities if they’re appointed to the position, for a term that ends in November.

The current council includes six brand-new members, many of whom have faced a steep learning curve over the past year. The person they appoint will also be a rookie, which makes it especially urgent that whoever’s appointed has a solid understanding of what the council does, what it can’t do, and the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches.

The council will hold a special meeting with the candidates on Thursday at 1pm, but this was the only opportunity for the public to ask them questions directly.

Unfortunately for the general public , the forum, hosted by Seattle CityClub, focused almost entirely on leading questions about issues that are unlikely to come up at the council in the next nine months, including a perennial debate over cars on Lake Washington Blvd., gripes about people parking in front of other people’s houses, SPD’s approach to neighborhood policing, and “the threat of Sound Transit” in the Chinatown-International District.

The shot selection seems even odder (and niche) when you look at the questions submitted by community members during the event, which included substantive questions about the tensions between displacement and growth, the unaddressed issue of deadly collisions on Rainier Ave. S., Seattle’s status as a sanctuary city for immigrants and refugees, and much more.

Although the new council member will chair the land use committee, there were no questions at all about land use or the city’s Comprehensive Plan, which will take up much of the council’s time during the appointee’s nine-month term.

Instead, the forum included multiple questions, spanning 15 minutes, focused on residents of Seward Park and drivers who use Lake Washington Boulevard.

“Pedestrianization of Lake Washington Boulevard has been a long running debate, given that South Seattle has less access to park space than the north end. Do you think the street should be closed to cars for visitors to enjoy?” one question began. “Making Lake Washington Boulevard only accessible to pedestrians and bikes is not something many in D2 desire. Bike lanes were installed in D2 without widespread community input or warning. Will you commit to keeping Lake Washington Boulevard open to vehicles?” (All said yes.)

And a followup, which moderator Tony Benton, of Rainier Avenue Radio, said he was asking on behalf of “me and my fellow community members who live near Lake Washington”: “When Lake Washington is shut down for cars, and it’s just walking, that’s cool, except all those cars park in our neighborhood and take up our parking spaces and sometimes don’t respect the property because they’re just coming to visit. And I know this is a complicated issue, but I’m just sharing with you the experience [of] some of us have who live very near the lake. When … folks park wherever they want to … what do you think about that?”

The city council does not control the Seattle Department of Transportation—the mayor does, and he has shown no interest in removing cars from Lake Washington Blvd. Parking enforcement is a function of the Seattle Police Department, which also answers to the mayor, not the council. SPD could decide to shift resources to foot patrols, but has not done so.

The city did consider making Lake Washington Blvd. car-free after a pilot closure during the pandemic, part of a citywide program to give people places to congregate safely outdoors. But SDOT ultimately rejected the idea of making the closure permanent, and instead has added spot improvements to slow drivers down, such as speed humps. The department has continued to hold its popular summer-only Bicycle Weekends, when a portion of the street becomes car-free for eight hours a day on Saturdays and Sundays.

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Another question presented light rail as an existential danger: “What is your position on the threat of Sound Transit to businesses, residents and community members of the Chinatown International District?” Views are sharply divided in the neighborhood about whether a new light rail station should serve the area or skip it; many see the new rail line as a benefit whose construction impacts can be mitigated, not a threat that needs to be moved outside the neighborhood. The new council member will not serve on the council’s transportation committee or the 18-member Sound Transit board, where the Seattle City Council gets just one seat, currently held by Dan Strauss.

One question was about the fate of small businesses like those in Columbia City, several of which, Benton said, recently claimed they were at risk of closing because of crime, lack of police response, and Seattle’s minimum wage. In response, several of the applicants said they’d push to bring police foot patrols back to the neighborhood—a decision that is up to SPD, and which, like ground-level parking enforcement decisions and Sound Transit’s station locations, the city council has no power to control.

Unlike those who submitted “live” questions online, members of the public who showed up to the Columbia City Theater in person did get a few minutes to ask questions, but they had a strict 10-second limit, which made for a strangely clipped and confrontational close to the event. “If you start talking about the circumstance, I’m going to say, ‘take the mic’ and we’re going to give it to the next person,” Benton instructed.  Each applicant had just 30 seconds to answer each audience question, with a verbal interruption at 15 seconds—not the best format for responding to questions like “what do you understand the role of a City Councilmember to be?” and “how will you prioritize environmental justice in this district?”

If you’re curious how the six finalists answered all these questions, you can watch the forum for yourself on the Seattle Channel. Or you can read the candidates’ applications and watch tomorrow’s special 1:00 meeting—the second and final opportunity to hear from the applicants before the council chooses a finalist at next Monday’s council meeting.

City Council, Elections, Uncategorized

It’s Time to Appoint Another New Councilmember!

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council will appoint a new colleague to City Council District 2—the seat vacated by Tammy Morales, who resigned last year—later this month (full process, including guidelines for applicants, and timeline here). The council went through this same process this time last year, when they appointed Tanya Woo to a vacant citywide seat after she lost to Morales in 2023.

As of Tuesday, about nine people had applied for the open seat, but many more are expected to submit applications before the deadline—this Thursday, January 9, at 5pm. At least half a dozen of these applicants (none of them, if you’re wondering, named Tanya Woo) have been making the political rounds.

Although the council appointment process is much more of a backroom affair than it was back when Josh and I were live-Slogging the public meetings that preceded Sally Clark’s appointment in 2006**, it will be at least somewhat more competitive than last year, when the council went through the motions of a public process before appointing Woo, the only member of 2023’s backlash election bloc who didn’t win in November. The council’s conservative-by-Seattle-standards majority will want to pick someone who can win an election, although they don’t have the greatest track record on that front—their last pick, Woo, lost to progressive Alexis Mercedes Rinck in a blowout last year.

As always, there are frontrunners. The two names we’re hearing most are Nimco Bulale—a Somali immigrant, racial equity consultant and former OneAmerica staffer who ran for the open 37th District state House seat last year—and Adonis Ducksworth, a longtime SDOT staffer who’s among many departmental staffers “on loan” to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office as his senior transportation advisor. Both Bulale and Ducksworth have been meeting with representatives from business and labor in the runup to the brief public process before the council chooses Woo’s successor.

Others who have reportedly applied for the open seat include Thaddaeus Gregory, a land use attorney and son of Seattle Municipal Court Judge Willie Gregory; Randy Engstrom, the former head of the city’s Office of Arts and Culture; and Takayo Ederer, a resident of Mount Baker.

The council will vote on the appointment on January 27. Whoever the new councilmember is, they will join the least experienced city council in modern history: The council’s longest-serving member, Dan Strauss, started in 2020, and the next longest-tenured, Sara Nelson, has been there since 2022. The remaining six members are all new as of last year.

* Those posts are, sadly, lost to time.