Tag: Seattle Renters Commission

City Council

Council Finally Seats Renters Commission, New Council Rules Allow Longer Public Comments

1. After an overload of drama last week, the Seattle City Council quietly approved all 14 nominees to the Seattle Renter’s Commission—an advisory body that has had just five members (all of whose terms are now expired) for the past 18 months. The appointments were part of the council’s consent agenda, and all seven council members who were present (Maritza Rivera was excused) voted to approve them, along with several other nominees to unrelated commissions.

As we reported last Wednesday, Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Rob Saka skipped out on the housing and human services committee meeting at the last minute, depriving the committee of a quorum and wasting the time of the nominees who showed up in person and online expecting to finally receive their long-delayed confirmations. Solomon and Alexis Mercedes Rinck held a “community discussion” of the appointments and other business on the committee agenda in lieu of the scheduled committee meeting.

Nelson told Solomon she wouldn’t attend the meeting on Tuesday, after receiving an email from former councilmember Moore urging her to not let the appointments move forward.

Saka, who was cc’d on a late-night email from Moore touting her proposed alternative to the renters’ commission, which would have added seven landlords to the mix, told Solomon he wouldn’t be attending the meeting just minutes before it started, citing unspecified personal matters for his unexcused absence.

During a council briefing meeting on Monday, Saka told his colleagues that “right before that meeting, on the bus to City Hall, I got some uncomfortable calls and and that really impacted my ability to to show up in a public meeting … and so in any event, I make no apologies for the decision.” Saka dismissed suggestions that he sat out the vote in order to deprive the committee of a quorum as a “grand conspiracy” with no factual basis.

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2. Also Tuesday, the council passed a new rule that will effectively prevent the council president and committee chairs from cutting public comment short just because they feel like it.

Currently, the person who’s chairing a meeting can decide, based entirely on their own feelings in the moment, to restrict comments to one minute instead of the standard two and to limit the amount of time allowed for public comments, depriving people of the opportunity to speak to their representatives.

This broad discretionary power has caused major problems in the recent past, as Council President Nelson has repeatedly shut down public comment and closed down the council chambers after would-be commenters have loudly protested being cut off. (Moore, who often took umbrage at critical public comments, once suggested that a group of people who had been locked out of council chambers planned to rush the dais and assault the council because they were pounding on the walls.)

The new public comment rule, proposed by frequent Nelson antagonist Dan Strauss (who will, if Nelson isn’t reelected this year, be the council’s most senior member and a contender for council president), increases the minimum time allotted for public comment from 20 minutes to an hour and stipulates that if there are fewer than 30 commenters, they will each get two minutes to speak. If the number of commenters is between 30 and 60, they’ll get a minute, and if there are more than 60, they’ll still get a minute unless the council president or committee chair sets a lower time.

City Council, Elections, Mayor Harrell

Harrell’s “Emergency Housing” Claims Don’t Stand Up to Scrutiny, Council Hopefuls Quizzed on Crime, Renters Commission Appointments Will Get a Vote After All

1. Mayor Bruce Harrell, who’s trying to fight off a strong challenge from labor organizer and Transit Riders Union general secretary Katie Wilson, claimed in a recent campaign mailer that he had created “Nearly 3,000 units of new emergency housing” during his first term.

On its face, this claim is impossible. Seattle has fewer than 3,000 shelter beds—also known as emergency housing—in the entire homelessness system system, and has actually lost several shelters since the pandemic, including critical beds for youth and young adults. Almost all of the remaining beds have existed since before Harrell took office.

Contacted this week about the numbers in the campaign flyer, Harrell’s office said they “appear to be in reference to the shelter and supportive housing units created, funded, or in production under our administration, as available on the Homelessness Action Plan.”

Even assuming Harrell’s campaign misspoke and was actually using the term “emergency housing” to refer collectively to all forms of emergency housing, long-term shelter like tiny house villages, and permanent housing, that number is still misleading, or off, by at least 500 beds,

First, the Homelessness Action Plan page credits the Harrell Administration with 16 projects, including tiny house villages, an encampment, and an emergency shelter, that opened between 2018 and 2022—Harrell’s first year in office. Of this group, 10 were new permanent housing projects that began construction before Harrell took office. Some, such as the Chief Seattle Club’s 2021 ʔálʔal project, opened so long ago that former mayor Jenny Durkan already took credit for them. Other projects that opened in 2023 were also underway long before Harrell took office, like Plymouth Housing’s Toft Terrace and Blake House projects, both funded by a capital campaign that ended in 2019.

Other projects Harrell is counting toward his success rate on “emergency housing” are still under negotiation, like a 45-unit permanent housing development on Sound Transit-owned land in the University District; are mere relocations of pre-existing shelter beds that Harrell is double-counting toward his “new beds” total (such as 77 tiny house village units); are projects that never happened—like the expansion of a Salvation Army shelter in SoDo that was thwarted by NIMBY activism; or are no longer open, like LIHI’s Salmon Bay RV lot, which shut down earlier this year to make way for new indoor pickleball court.

Wilson, who campaigned for last year’s social housing measure, has made housing (and progressive revenue to fund it) the centerpiece of her campaign. Harrell, in contrast, served as the face of the Seattle Chamber-backed campaign for Proposition 1B, which would have funded traditional affordable housing using existing city funds in lieu of a new tax for permanently affordable social housing.

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2. PubliCola continues to hear that most of Seattle’s eight sitting City Councilmembers plan to support former District 5 (North Seattle) Councilmember Debora Juarez for appointment to the seat just vacated by Cathy Moore, who resigned after serving just 18 months.

A more openly law-and-order candidate, Julie Kang, has impressed some council members with her advocacy for small businesses and vocal support from community candidates—but, to paraphrase a headline we ran before former councilmember Tanya Woo was appointed to replace Tammy Morales, these forums amount to pretending the fix isn’t in for Juarez already, and that all six candidates have an equal shot.

Juarez, who chose not to run for reelection in 2023, said during the city council’s lone public forum earlier this week that she decided she “wanted to get back into this business because [of], viscerally, the emotion that I had watching a US senator [Alex Padilla], a Latino man … in a federal building where he’s shouting out, I’m a US senator, and he’s being cuffed. That could have been my dad, my husband, my brothers.” Juarez is Mexican American as well as a member of the Blackfeet Nation.

In response to questions about how she would address sex work on Aurora Ave. N, Juarez pointed out that there are just seven beds in the city for women exiting the sex trade—a comment that highlighted Moore’s insistence on handing. up to $2 million dedicated to “receiving” beds for former sex workers to an out-of-town nonprofit, The More We Love, that takes women from North Seattle and moves them to shelter beds in Renton, miles south of Seattle.

At a community forum at North Seattle College the night before the council hearing, the questions—posed by former council candidate and Unified Outreach program manager David Toledo—skewed classic NIMBY: Do you support “free-range zoning”? The proposed comprehensive plan fails to support trees; how will you address that fact? “There are a lot of small businesses that are suffering with lots of violence and theft. What will you do about that? If you were convicted of a crime, would you resign?

In response to the two crime-related questions, Juarez—seeming slightly exasperated—noted that there are many types of crime, and a big difference between violence against business owners and someone walking out without paying for something. “Violence, absolutely, that’s crime against a person,” Juarez said. With theft, she continued, there are gradations. “We have jail capacity issues. … We simply can’t take people in for … low level crimes when we have rapists and murderers” who should be in those cells.

Kang, in contrast, said “we need to be strict and firm” with shoplifters who steal things they don’t really need.

As for the question about resignation, Juarez said it really depended on what kind of offense it was—”If I killed somebody, absolutely, but you know, if I, by accident, picked up a salad at QFC and didn’t know was in my cart, I’m not gonna resign.” Later, after everyone else said they would resign if they were convicted or pled guilty to even the lowest-level crime, Juarez amended her answer to “yes, I would resign.” Kang, responding to the same trick question, said that “being an educator, I stay away from trouble.”

The council will vote on the appointment at a special meeting at 9:30 Monday morning.

3. Later that same day, the council will take up 14 appointments to the Seattle Renters Commission that were thwarted earlier this week after Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmember Rob Saka did not show up at a meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee, declining the committee of the required three-person quorum. (Former councilmember Moore, as chair of the committee, had refused to put the long-delayed appointments on the agenda for the entirety of her term, and drafted legislation to replace the renters; commission with a joint landlord-tenant group).

In a statement announcing her decision to move forward with the appointments on Thursday, Nelson said, “I want to acknowledge the frustration my excused absence contributed to the lack of quorum at yesterday’s HHS committee meeting and apologize to the people who took the time to show up for the committee vote on their appointment to a board or commission, including the Renters’ Commission. I am grateful for their willingness to serve our city, and delays in the appointment process serve no one well.”

Nelson did not say how she planned to vote on the appointments, which the committee’s vice chair, Mark Solomon, put on the agenda after talking to renters’ commission nominees and learning that their appointments and reappointments have been delayed as long as a year and a half.

Nelson told the Solomon, that she would be absent one day before the meeting. Multiple council sources said Saka was in his office with the door closed while the committee met just feet away in council chambers. In a statement, Saka told PubliCola he couldn’t attend the meeting because of “unexpected personal conflicts.”

 

 

City Council

Renters Commission Appointments Thwarted by Saka and Nelson’s Last-Minute Absence from Their Own Committee

By Erica C. Barnett

For 18 months, under former city councilmember Cathy Moore’s leadership, nominees to the Seattle Renters Commission did not receive a single hearing. Moore, whose job as housing and human services committee chair included confirming appointments and reappointments to volunteer city commissions under the committee’s purview, refused to seat the Renters Commission even as she worked on legislation to dramatically reduce eviction protections, an issue the commission would have worked on if it was ever allowed to exist.

After Moore resigned, the vice-chair of the committee, Mark Solomon, approached the renters’ commission members and unconfirmed nominees and told them that before Moore’s replacement—likely former councilmember Debora Juarez—takes over next month, he would finally appoint as many renters’ commission nominees as possible, said Kate Rubin, whose membership on the renters’ commission expired in February.

Thrilled, commission appointees showed up at City Hall Wednesday morning—only to learn that their appointments would continue to be delayed: About three minutes before the committee was scheduled to start, Councilmember Rob Saka sent a message down from his City Hall office that he would not be attending.

Before Solomon adjourned the meeting (and re-convened the same gathering as an informal “community discussion” to avoid breaking council rules), Rinck went to Saka’s second-floor office to see if he was there. Saka’s staffer disappeared behind his closed inner-office door, emerged a few minutes later, and told Rinck that Saka wasn’t available because he was meeting with his chief of staff, Elaine Ko.

In a statement Wednesday, Saka told PubliCola, “This morning I was unable to attend the Housing & Human Services committee meeting due to unexpected personal conflicts. I understand this may have caused undue frustration and inconvenience for attendees and I will work with my colleagues to discuss next steps to carry out necessary committee business.”

The previous day, Council President Sara Nelson, who reportedly got an email from Moore asking her not to allow the appointments to move forward earlier in the week, had reportedly asked Solomon to remove the appointments from the committee agenda. That same day, Nelson reportedly told Solomon she would not attend the meeting, leaving the committee with less than the three-member quorum required to meet.

On Tuesday, at 2:30 in the morning, Moore sent an email to Solomon, cc’ing Saka and Nelson, expressing apparent surprise that there was “a slew of appointments to the Renters’ Commission scheduled for a vote on Wednesday.”

Before she resigned, Moore had suggested replacing the Renters Commission with a joint landlord-tenant commission with seven landlords and eight tenants.

“When we spoke several weeks ago, you mentioned you were interested in my proposal to revamp the commission into a rental housing commission composed of renters and housing providers,” Moore told Solomon.

The renters’ commission is the only city body that works and advocates on behalf of tenants. Rubin said that if Moore’s legislation moves forward, it will inevitably be dominated by landlords. “Having worked in those spaces, I can tell you that the renters would have been shut out,” Rubin said.

 

 

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Nelson confirmed that she told Solomon Tuesday afternoon that “I wasn’t going to be here, so they already knew.” She declined to comment further about why she wasn’t present.

Solomon told PubliCola he was “disappointed” in the lack of quorum, adding, “I believe it’s common-sense good governance to promptly seat all vacancies on City commissions. It’s what constituents should expect from our work. These commission volunteers took time out of their day to show up both in person and online, to talk about their qualifications and lived-experiences as renters in Seattle, and to share their vision for their work on the Seattle Renters Commission. I am grateful to everyone who showed up and enjoyed learning more about these qualified nominees.”

During the meeting, commission nominees expressed frustration at what many of them described as Saka and Nelson’s callous disregard for people who showed up to accept appointments to a volunteer commission.

Commission member Julissa Sánchez, the advocacy director at Choose 180 and a former advocate at the Tenants Union, said she was”very disappointed that we did not meet quorum, because we have been waiting for two years to expand the Seattle Renters Commission.”
Sanchéz, whose term expired in February, said, “I’m here to be reinstated into the Seattle Renters Commission, because … renters [for whom] English is not their first language, or who may not speak English at all, are often left off the table or out of access to different resources.”

“I am so furious,” Rubin told PubliCola on Wednesday. As the only paid staffer for the renters’ advocacy group Be: Seattle, Rubin said advocating for the renters’ commission “is pulling me away from my actual job, seemingly for no reason,” given that the council appears to have no interest in seating the commission.

“It’s so disrespectful to waste our time in this way we’re not being paid to do this work and there’s no real voice for renters at city hall other than Councilmember Rinck. … It’s hard for renters to show up to testify. It’s been just awful.”

Rinck, who became visibly emotional while expressing her frustration Nelson and Saka from the dais, echoed Rubin’s sentiment about disrespect when we spoke a few hours after the meeting ended.

“It’s my job to sit in this seat. I had the time on my calendar dedicated to be there. It’s my job to be there. Everyone else in the room was there on a volunteer basis,” Rinck said. “We want people to be engaged in our local government and have trust and have a collaborative relationship with our commissions, so what I’m struggling with is the disrespect to those folks that [Saka and Nelson] displayed by just not even showing up to committee.”

Many of the renters’ commission appointments were from Mayor Bruce Harrell; a spokesperson for the mayor told PubliCola his office was “disappointed that the Council’s Housing and Human Services committee was unable to reach quorum today, given we had commission nominees who we had asked to attend, and the agenda contained important legislative matters, including our proposal to protect constituents from predatory homebuying practices.”

In addition to the renters’ commission appointments, the committee was supposed to approve appointments to the Disability Commission, the Seattle Housing Authority Board, and the Seattle Social Housing Public Development Authority Governing Council.

And it was supposed to adopt an annual action plan for $16 million in federal Housing and Urban Development funding that has not been canceled by the Trump Administration. Delaying that action plan won’t put the funding at risk in itself, but Rinck said it speaks to the absent committee members’ priorities that they allowed such an important vote to slip.

Members of the renters’ commission planned to attend a meeting tonight of an ad hoc group called the Safe and Stable Housing Working Group to discuss potential reforms to Moore’s draft legislation, which would have ended the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums, eliminated limits on fees for late payment, and overturned a law allowing tenants to add new roommates without prior approval, among other changes.

“Councilmember Solomon said his intention was to ensure that nobody was forced out of their housing and to make the nonprofit landlords whole,” Rubin said.

Now, the meeting may end up focusing on the council’s refusal to seat the renters’ commission.

In an email to committee members on Wednesday, Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness director Alison Eisinger said the council’s refusal to seat the renters’ commission in the last scheduled housing committee meeting before the council goes on its August recess “undermine[s] not only that group’s ability to convene and meaningfully carry out its role” but contributes “to the sense that ‘government’  has no interest in solving problems of the people, by the people, and for the people. There is work to be done in this city regarding housing and human services, and it’s reasonable to expect that City Council Committee meetings are one of the places where it gets done.”

Saka’s office sent an automated response to Eisinger and others who contacted his office about his absence, which included a link to “Eviction Assistance.” That link leads to a 404 Error page.