Cathy Moore and Maritza Rivera supported replacing the recusal standard for conflicts of interest with a lower “disclosure” standard.
By Erica C. Barnett
City Councilmember Cathy Moore announced Friday that she is withdrawing a bill that would have lowered ethical standards for city council members, allowing them to vote on legislation in which they have a direct financial conflict of interest. Currently, council members must recuse themselves from participating in legislation that would benefit or harm them financially; the proposed standard, supported by Seattle Ethics and Elections director Wayne Barnett, would have allowed members to vote but required them to disclose their financial conflicts first.
In a statement, Moore said her conversations with colleagues made it “clear that we require more time to ensure we get this right.”
A council committee moved the legislation forward last week with just two votes in favor and three abstentions, indicating the council’s reluctance to go on the record supporting a bill that had galvanized massive public opposition (and virtually no public support.) In addition to removing an ethical requirement that has worked for more than four decades, the bill would have allowed the council’s two landlords, Mark Solomon and Maritza Rivera, to vote on an upcoming Moore bill to roll back eviction protections passed by the previous council.
Moore’s legislation may not have had enough support to pass at all in its current form. Bob Kettle, who abstained from last week’s vote, told PubliCola on Tuesday that we shouldn’t assume he’s a “yes” on the bill. Before Moore pulled it, Kettle was planning to introduce an amendment that would have changed the legislation’s effective date to January 2028, after the next district council elections—and long after Moore introduces her proposal to roll back renter protections, which is supposed to be coming any day now.
Mark Solomon, who voted for Moore’s bill in committee, told PubliCola on Thursday (before Moore pulled her legislation) that he planned to vote against it at full council unless it included a true recusal requirement—and he said an amendment added by Hollingsworth that would require recusal in extremely narrow circumstances didn’t cut it.
“I like that there’s a call for more transparency, I like that there’s a call for disclosure, but when I ask [Barnett] if this bill, as currently amended, is going to strengthen our ethics code and I can’t get a yes or no, that gives me pause,” Solomon said. “I want recusal. I want disclosure. I want transparency. And if what is being proposed does not provide that, then I’m a no.”
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If the council had passed the legislation on a 5-4 vote, Mayor Bruce Harrell—who opposed similar legislation when he was on the city council—would have been able to issue an effective veto, since overriding a veto requires a 6-3 vote of the council. On Thursday, Harrell’s office declined to say whether he would veto the bill if it passed. In a statement, Harrell said, “I do not support this proposal that appears to diminish the City’s strong ethics rules,” adding that the current recusal standard establishes “a clear, objective line to demonstrate to the community that decisions are being made solely with the public interest at heart,” while disclosure does not.
In her statement, Moore said she hoped to reintroduce an amended version of her bill at some future date.
“As the Council further discusses the appropriate policy choice for our city, it’s my hope that we can collaborate to find a standard that both upholds the accountability of elected officials and preserves the integrity of our system, without impeding the essential functions of local government,” Moore said.
Supporters of Moore’s bill have claimed that requiring district council members to recuse themselves from voting “disenfranchises” their voters and robs them of representation on important issues. Many of those constituents showed up at public meetings week after week to express their opposition to the proposal, saying they did not want their district representatives to be allowed to vote in their own self-interest.
Anitra Freeman, with Women In Black and SHARE/WHEEL, testifies against the proposed changes to the city’s ethics code on Thursday.
By Erica C. Barnett
A Seattle City Council committee voted to advance legislation on Thursday that will revise the city’s ethics code to allow council members to vote in their own financial interest, eliminating a longstanding law that requires council members to recuse themselves from votes that could benefit or harm them financially. The legislation now heads to the full council; if passed, it will overturn an ethical requirement that has persisted for more than 40 years, including a decade of district city council elections.
The legislation eliminates the requirement that council members abstain from voting on legislation on which they have a direct financial conflict of interest; instead, they’ll merely have to disclose the conflict before they vote in committee and at full council meetings.
This lower standard will allow the council’s two landlords, Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon, to vote on upcoming legislation to repeal several anti-eviction laws passed by the previous city council. Councilmember Cathy Moore, who is finalizing that legislation, has pushed to get the ethics changes passed before the vote, prompting opponents to point out that that two bills are obviously connected.
“There’s no need to rush this. Unless there is,” Councilmember Dan Strauss said. “If we see,inthenextfewweeks,legislationthatwillonlypassbecauseofthebillbeforeus,thenwe’llknowwhythisprocessisrushed.”
The vote came at the end of a long, rancorous meeting. Former council member Kshama Sawant and a couple dozen of her supporters showed up to disrupt the comment portion of the meeting, punctuating nearly every public comment with chants like “Who needs to be thrown out? Maritza Rivera!” Sawant, who has been largely absent from local politics, briefly reemerged on the national stage last year when she joined Jill Stein’s Abandon Harris campaign to defeat Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She’s now promoting her new group, Workers Strike Back.
After about an hour of chanting and denunciations, committee chair Sara Nelson called a recess and most of the council retreated into their offices, continuing the meeting on Zoom while only Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a non-committee member who has voiced opposition to the bill, stayed in council chambers.
Strauss, who isn’t on the committee, either, repeatedly tried to speak but was cut off by Nelson, who insisted Strauss’ comments were out of order or eating into important committee time. Strauss eventually came back into council chambers, where opponents of the legislation snapped their fingers in support when he tried to speak and quietly jeered every time Nelson told him to be quiet.
No one testified in favor of the legislation, which appears to have no constituency beyond city council members with current or potential future financial conflicts of interest. Rinck said she’d received more than 1,300 emails opposing the legislation, most of them unique, along with just one email in support.
Council members who support the changes, along with Ethics and Elections Commission director Wayne Barnett, said requiring district council members to abstain from voting when they have financial conflicts deprives their constituents of “representation” on the council. District council members, Barnett argued, naturally pay more attention to their own constituents than citywide council members do. (This was the argument neighborhood activists made for district elections back in 2013).
Before Nelson cut him off, Strauss pushed back on this notion, saying that while he was elected by voters in District 6, he represents the entire city and his votes impact residents citywide. “I strongly disagree, because if I’m just going to look after my own district, then I’m not serving all Seattle,” Strauss said. Rinck, one of two citywide council members (Nelson is the other), chimed in, saying she had to “refute” the idea “that our citywide council members’ votes or perspectives are not potentially as valuable, or that our roles are in some way meaningfully different” than council members elected by district.
Solomon, who was appointed to the open District 2 seat in January after Tammy Morales resigned last year, suggested that it wouldn’t be fair to require him to recuse himself from votes that would impact all other landlords in the city equally. Under current law, Solomon asked, “Is there an exception, because me, as a guy living in one half of duplex, is not going to benefit more than anybody else who’s renting out a duplex?” (There is not).
Hollingsworth, who said she was seeking a middle ground between “extremes,” proposed an amendment that would require recusal in some cases—specifically, whenever a council member’s financial conflict would create “unique and direct gain or loss that is specific to the elected official but not other persons or entities regulated by the legislative matter.”
It’s unclear what kind of situation would ever meet this extraordinarily high standard, and council central staff director Ben Noble struggled to come up with hypothetical scenarios in which a single person—say, a flower shop owner who would be negatively impacted by a law requiring businesses to open at 9 instead of 7—would be impacted differently than other flower shop owners. In reality, council members rarely recuse themselves under the existing, broader requirements, so it seems reasonable to assume that Hollingsworth’s amendment will rarely, if ever, be applied.
Council members who supported the law took pains to argue that by lowering the ethical standard from recusal to disclosure, they were not actually lowering the standard, something even Barnett—who strongly supports the changes—didn’t claim.
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“Councilmember Strauss has said on a number of occasions now that we’re lowering the standard, and I want the record to reflect that we are not lowering the standard,” Rivera said. “There are still standard rules here for ethics. We’re making some clarifying amendments, and I really strongly thought that needed to be stated.”
“We are not taking the guardrails off, we are making them better so that we as a council can work more effectively,” Moore added.
Tellingly, none of the council members who support the rollback have taken credit for the changes in their newsletters or issued press releases touting the elimination of recusal requirements, and three of the five supporters abstained from the committee vote, allowing the literal record to reflect that they did not take any position on the proposal in committee. Only Solomon and Rivera, the council’s two landlords, voted for the legislation.
Nelson, citing Rivera’s commitment to attend an event honoring retiring University of Washington president Ana Mari Cauce, refused to allow Strauss and Rinck to make final comments on the proposal before the committee voted, telling Hollingsworth that she was “overstepping” by asking her to let Rinck—who had been raising her hand on Zoom for several minutes—say a few words before the vote.
After the committee voted, and everyone but Kettle and Hollingsworth had signed off the Zoom call, Rinck finally had a chance to speak against the proposal. Addressing the empty seats beside her, Rinck said, “I have three simple questions for every person who usually sits behind this dais: Why now, what comes next from this body, and how much of that will build off the backs of poor and working people? I understand the committee has already voted today, but when this comes before full council, I ask to please vote for the best interest of our community by voting no to end this legislation from moving forward. This is not good governance, and it’s betrayal of public trust.”
Before the vote, Moore noted that nothing is “set in stone,” and that a future council could decide to reimpose the recusal requirements if they want. In reality, it’s hard to think of a scenario in which the council would decide to impose stricter ethical standards on itself once the old standards are gone.
The current city council includes five members who’ve served less than two years, two who’ve served less than one year, and one, Solomon, who wasn’t even elected. The two longest-serving tenured members are now in their second terms. This group, with less collective experience in office than any council in Seattle history, is about to eliminate a basic standard for ethical governance that has stood for decades. The consequences of their decision will persist long after they’ve left their current jobs.
Former city council member Kshama Sawant yells “Coward!” at Councilmember Bob Kettle as the council goes into recess on Thursday.
By Erica C. Barnett
Over the past few weeks, the Seattle City Council has fast-tracked legislation that would allow them to vote on legislation that presents a financial conflict of interest. Currently all city employees are required to recuse themselves from matters in which they have financial conflicts; the bill, sponsored by Cathy Moore, would remove the recusal requirement and revert to rules, which currently apply only to tax proposals, requiring council members to merely disclose their conflicts one time before voting.
The council is proposing the changes shortly before they’re expected to vote to eliminate winter and school-year eviction moratoriums, roll back rules allowing tenants to add roommates, and increase the maximum late fee for unpaid rent, which is currently $10. Two council members, Mark Solomon and Maritza Rivera, are landlords who might have to recuse themselves from voting under the current rules.
Moore and other council members who support the change have argued, dubiously, that abstaining from such votes would deprives their constituents of representation. Maritza Rivera, who represents Northeast Seattle’s District 4, said was “compelled” by the argument that her constituents would be disenfranchised if she couldn’t vote despite a financial conflict. “We were put here to represent our constituents, and if they want something, then we’re not able to advocate for that what they would want,” she said.
Last Thursday, many of those constituents showed up to a meeting of the council’s governance committee to voice their opposition to Moore’s proposal, saying they expect council members to avoid conflicts of interest, not embrace them.
Rachel Snell, who also testified at a meeting of the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission on Wednesday, pointed out that not one person has testified in favor of rolling back the ethics code. “Why would elected officials who were voted into office by the people even consider a piece of legislation that is strongly opposed by the people?” Snell said. “I said this Tuesday, and I’m going to say it again: You are not entitled to demand our trust and support. You have to earn our respect and trust.”
Even former city council member Kshama Sawant, who sponsored the anti-eviction rules the council is preparing to repeal, got into the action. She and a small group of supporters chanted and yelled until committee chair Sara Nelson pulled the meeting into recess; at that point, the group came up to deliver an impromptu lecture on renters rights and encourage people to join Sawant’s group Workers Strike Back to a mostly empty room.
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Councilmember Dan Strauss, sitting in on the committee, cross-examined Wayne Barnett, the director of the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission, about Council President Sara Nelson’s vocal opposition to Barnett’s recommendation that former councilmember Tanya Woo recuse herself from a vote on delivery workers’ wages because she owns a restaurant.
The interrogation—seemingly structured to suggest that Nelson put pressure on Barnett to support changing the ethics law—led to some sniping between Nelson and Strauss, who suggested that a compromise might be to delay the effective date of the changes until after the 2027 elections, when the seven district councilmembers will have an opportunity to run under the new ethics rules.
Barnett, who enforces the city’s ethics code, said he wasn’t taking any position on the proposal. However, he added that “therearetimeswhereIfeellikeeveryoneshouldjustknow” what people’s conflicts are—”like, putoutinpublicwhatyourinterestsare,thenyoucaneitherrecuseyourself …orgoforward,andyou’regoingtobeheldaccountableforthatdecisionyoumakebyyourvoters.”
Barnett, who worked at the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission for several years before starting his current job in 2004, said he became accustomed to “big-city politics” in places like New York and Boston, where city council members just have to disclose their conflicts. As an astute PubliCola reader pointed out, Boston’s city council isn’t exactly a paragon of ethical behavior these days.
