Tag: tammy morales

City Council, homelessness, housing, State of Washington

Head of Anti-Eviction Group Leaves for Job at Homelessness Authority, Ferguson Appointment Could Shake Up Legislature
Photo by Allan Vega on Unsplash

And City Council president Sara Nelson suggests departing Councilmember Tammy Morales was lying about her own experiences. “This is a positive work environment,” she told KUOW.

1. Edmund Witter, the longtime director of the Housing Justice Project, is leaving HJP to become the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s general counsel—part of a shakeup at the KCRHA under CEO Kelly Kinnison, who became the homelessness agency’s second permanent CEO in June.

In addition to Witter, Kinnison is bringing on Simon Foster as deputy director and Xochitl Maykovich as his associate deputy overseeing strategy. Foster directs the homelessness, housing, and community development division of King County’s Departmhent of Community and Human Services; Maykovich is his chief strategy and operations officer and served as interim deputy director for much of the past year. The new hires appear to be part of a larger reorganization at the agency.

KCRHA did not respond to a request for an interview with Kinnison.

The Housing Justice Project, a project of the King County Bar Association, provides free legal counsel to tenants facing eviction, who have had the right to an attorney in Seattle since 2021.

Instead of fighting evictions in the courts, Witter said, he’ll be “working on the other side of the equation to help make sure those programs [for people experiencing homelessness] work.”

In the past few months, as evictions have risen and the number of people seeking attorneys has exploded, HJP has been overwhelmed, Witter said. “The court is hearing about 800 cases a month, and we’re [only] contracted to do about 200 cases a month,” Witter said. “In October, we had 608 households who applied for our services and qualified for an attorney, and we were only about to carry about 160 of those” cases.

Instead of providing attorneys for each person, HJP has been “unbundling” its services to provide at least some help to as many people as possible, but “tenants are appearing pro se”—acting as their own attorneys—”in front of judges now. The numbers are as bad as we’ve seen in 20 years, certainly since 2008,” the first year of the Great Recession.

Even compared to the HJP, the regional homelessness authority is hardly an oasis of calm. The agency’s first several years were a period of frequent upheaval marked by unforced errors, abandoned and unsuccessful initiatives, and financial debacles. In the year after the agency’s first CEO, Marc Dones, left, the KCRHA had three interim directors. Now, Kinnison seems eager to overhaul and reorganize the agency.

Witter says he’s hoping to help the KCRHA streamline and improve its contracts with the nonprofits that do the work of addressing homelessness across King County. Many of these groups have complained in the past about late payments that force them to go into debt, dip into reserves, or scale back programs while they wait for funding.

The KCRHA, Witter noted, has “not had a general counsel, ever” in four years of operations, which is practically unheard-of for such a large government entity. “It’s a $253 million organization with tons of compliance” requirements that will likely become more complicated under Trump, Witter said. “Not to mention all the other government issues they have to deal with, [like] open meetings and public records.”

HJP’s Spokane County managing attorney, Renee Ballou, will take over Witter’s job on an interim basis while the group looks for a permanent replacement, Witter said.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

2. Governor-elect (and state Attorney General) Bob Ferguson is considering State Sen. Joe Nguyen (D-34, West Seattle and Vashon) for director of the state Department of Commerce, whose wide portfolio includes affordable housing, energy and climate investments, broadband, gun violence prevention, and local economic development. Nguyen confirmed that he is “under consideration,” but did not know when Ferguson planned to make his decision or announce his pick.

If it is Nguyen, Ferguson will have to act fast. The next legislative session starts on January 13, and the 34th District Democrats and the King County Council will have to appoint a successor, a process that takes weeks.

Commerce director Mike Fong, appointed by Gov. Jay Inslee in 2023, will become Snohomish County’s director of economic development. The role is similar to the one Fong held before his stint at the Commerce Department, when he was Snohomish County’s chief recovery and resilience officer. Prior to that, Fong was a longtime city staffer who rose to the position of senior deputy mayor under Jenny Durkan.

Ferguson has brought over most of his senior staff from the Attorney General’s Office. His transition office said they had no information to share yet on the appointment.

3. After City Councilmember  Tammy Morales announced she’s stepping down because of what she described as bullying and undermining by her colleagues, KUOW—like many outlets—interviewed Morales about her decision. Then they gave one of the people Morales has accused of fostering a toxic workplace environment, Council President Sara Nelson, almost 15 minutes of air time to say Morales was lying.

“I’m frankly shocked and disappointed with the way she has characterized the dynamic on council and what occurs at the dais,” Nelson told KUOW’s Soundside. Morales, Nelson suggested, was just lashing out because she hasn’t done the work of convincing colleagues to support her proposals. “It’s our responsibility to work with our colleagues on our own time and try to build support for our legislative priorities,” Nelson said.

Nelson, who campaigned for Morales’ 2023 opponent Tanya Woo and oversaw her appointment to a citywide council seat after she lost to Morales, thanked KUOW on X for “the opportunity to set the record straight” about her colleague’s experience of working with Nelson and the rest of the council, who Morales also accused of gaslighting—treating her as if she was imagining her own experience. “This is a positive work environment,” Nelson insisted.

She wasn’t quite done shading Morales. On the city’s website seeking applications to fill Morales’ seat, the link in “Tammy Morales (District 2) resigned her seat” goes not to Morales’ resignation announcement but to Nelson’s own terse statement about Morales’ departure.

(Update: The link to Nelson’s statement has been removed as of late Tuesday morning.)

City Council

Seattle Nice: Should Tammy Morales Have Stayed on the Council?

By Erica C. Barnett

This week’s Seattle Nice, about the news that Seattle City Councilmember Tammy Morales is stepping down because of what she described as a toxic work environment that has made it impossible for her to pass even the most anodyne legislation, was a pretty wild one.

I’ll be honest: I felt pretty frustrated, because I had to spend so much time responding to a false equivalency, as my two esteemed (but in this case totally incorrect) colleagues insisted that the workplace situation Morales described was no different than what other council members have had to endure from members of the public (in the form of mean public comments and protests) and Kshama Sawant (in the form of lengthy denunciations.)

Sawant is no longer on the council, and her diatribes invariably proceeded votes she lost. Unlike her former colleague, Morales does not use invective or make personal attacks. More importantly, objections from the public to policies being enacted by their elected representatives are not remotely the same as actions by elected officials to bully, gaslight, and undermine a colleague’s ability to do her job, which is how Morales described her untenable situation on the council.

I can’t believe I have to say this again, but: A) the public is allowed to make negative comments and protest the actions of the people who represent them. And B) Morales did not accuse her colleagues of “being mean” or complain about losing 8-1 votes. Instead, she gave specific examples of times when her colleagues have publicly attacked her, questioned her motives, and worked both publicly and behind the scenes to undermine her and make it, according to Morales, impossible for her to do her job.

In short, Morales described a workplace in which she knew she would be on the losing end of controversial votes, like the vote to install CCTV police cameras across the city, but thought she would be able to work with colleagues on some issues, like encouraging small-scale community development with zoning bonuses. Instead, she said, her colleagues picked fights at every opportunity (even yanking many of her budget amendments out of the “consent package” of top council priorities in order to vote them down), and publicly accused her of trying to use her elected position to harm the city.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

When Morales wanted to pull just $500,000 out of the brand-new $10 million police surveillance program to restore some tenant services, for example, Bob Kettle said she had sent him “over the edge,” seething, “It is unconscionable that you created a situation”—crime in Seattle, basically—”and now you want to take out the fix for that situation!”

This is not a normal situation, and I’m not just saying that because, as Sandeep put it, I “like” Morales. I’ve covered the council for a long time (long enough to remember other council members who were often on the losing end of 8-1 votes, including, famously, Nick Licata) and I can’t recall any council with such a toxic dynamic. Certainly, I’ve never seen a council with this many brand-new members who act this convinced that they know more about how to run the city than anyone who came before them, and so publicly dismissive of city experts when they try to explain why things work the way they do. (Two recent cases in point: Rob Saka’s curt dismissal of a Seattle Department of Transportation expert on transportation equity and the council’s recent decision to move tenant assistance programs from the Department of Construction and Inspections, which oversees landlord-tenant enforcement, to the Human Services Department, which has no jurisdiction over rental housing.)

I’ve observed the new council closely over the past 11 months, watching hundreds of hours of meetings, and have seen in real time the public manifestations of what Morales told me about this week—council members losing their temper at her, attacking her in highly personal terms for holding fairly standard progressive positions, and putting Kshama Sawant’s incendiary words in her mouth.

I also listened to what Morales and her staff told me about internal dynamics on the second floor of City Hall and did not think she was “playing the world’s tiniest violin,” as Sandeep put it, but describing the kind of toxic workplace that many people are probably familiar with. Most of us have had jobs that became intolerable, and we’ve left those jobs. As an elected official, Morales is obligated to take this decision more seriously than someone walking out mid-shift at Urban Outfitters, but I believe her when she said she couldn’t do it anymore, and I find her reasons credible and relatable.

Morales is hardly the only city council member who has stepped down before the end of a term. Teresa Mosqueda left after she ran for, and won, a position on the King County Council. Rob Johnson left for a high-paying job with the NHL after public protests over a bike lane made him nervous for his family’s safety. Sally Clark left after she got a better job offer at the University of Washington. Jim Compton left to travel and give lectures in Egypt and Romania. Of those four, only Morales has faced criticism that she is leaving because she couldn’t take the heat.

On the podcast, David suggested that it would be fine for Morales to step down if she’s actually having “serious mental health concerns,” but otherwise she should have stuck it out. We didn’t have time, but I wanted to ask my co-hosts: Why do council members who leave for arguably selfish reasons, like a job with less stress and more pay, not face a similarly high bar for “abandoning” their constituents? Why is Morales, alone among council members who have left before their terms end, supposed to stay and be a martyr?

Morales has said the council is a toxic workplace in ways that have prevented her from doing her job. It’s understandable that the council and the people who supported them, like Sandeep, would be defensive. But I do think they should—as new progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck put it—”take a breath” and consider what it means that they just drove one of their independently elected colleagues not just to quit, but to put out an unusually candid list of her reasons for leaving.

City Council, Elections

Newest City Council Member “Deeply Saddened” By Morales’ Decision to Step Down
City Councilmembers Tammy Morales and Alexis Mercedes Rinck

“I sincerely hope that [the council will] take a breath and commit to trying something a bit different, since things were not working for at least one of their colleagues.”

By Erica C. Barnett

New Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck was as surprised as anyone to learn that progressive Councilmember Tammy Morale will resign in January, barely a year after defeating Tanya Woo, but she said she “obviously” respects Morales’ decision “to do what’s best for her, her team, and her humanity.”

As we reported on Wednesday, Morales said she decided to step down after nearly a year of “being undermined” by her colleagues, starting with their decision to install Woo into a vacant citywide council position after she was the only centrist candidate to lose last year. Rinck defeated Woo in November, winning more votes than any local candidate in modern Seattle history.

Rinck told PubliCola she was “deeply saddened” when Morales let her know on Monday that she was stepping down. “In so many ways, Councilmember Morales has been a beacon for progressive values, and I was hoping to be able to join her and partner in this work,” Rinck said.

New council members, including Bob Kettle and Cathy Moore, frequently used Morales as a synecdoche for the entire previous city council—which passed landmark progressive legislation, including the JumpStart payroll tax—and a one-for-one stand-in for socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant). Reflecting on her decision to leave, Morales said she hoped her next elected replacement will be able to come in fresh, unburdened by any association with the previous council, and that Rinck will be able to build better relationships as a newcomer coming in with such an overwhelming mandate.

Rinck said she spend much of her first two days going around and talking to her new colleagues about “the work ahead of us to and how we can work together.” But, she said, “I’ve been very clear to say that I hope we can take this time to all reflect on our own behaviors and the kind of work environment we’d like to have. I can understand feelings of defensiveness and how people might see their own perspectives on how the last 11 months have gone, but I sincerely hope that [the council will] take a breath and commit to trying something a bit different, since things were not working for at least one of their colleagues.”

The council will appoint a replacement for Morales after she steps down early next year, and the position will be on the regular 2025 primary and general election ballots. It seems unlikely the council would welcome Woo back into the fold right after she lost an election so overwhelmingly (her fourth second-place finish in a row), but they already showed their willingness to ignore the will of the voters when they appointed her in the first place, so there’s a precedent—and Woo would only have to win reelection in District 2, where she lost more narrowly to Morales in 2023.

Business and labor allies are already scrambling to find candidates for next year’s election. In the meantime, Rinck said, “I’m really focused on making sure that my office is spending dedicated additional time in District 2 to support community dialogue and make sure that we have a true champion to represent their needs in city hall.”

City Council, Elections

City Councilmember Tammy Morales Will Leave the Council In January

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Tammy Morales, who was just reelected to her Southeast Seattle seat last year, is resigning from the city council effective January 6. Morales spoke with PubliCola in her City Council office on Monday morning. Morales announced her decision just two days after Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a progressive and the youngest person ever to serve on the city council, had her official public swearing-in.

Morales she started thinking seriously about leaving the council in September, after she “went home and screamed at my family” following a confrontation on the council dais.

“I think that made me realize that I am anxious going out on the dais now, because I never know when I’m going to get attacked for saying something,” Morales said. “It just made me realize that I am not able to represent my constituents, because I’m being attacked regularly and being undermined in the work that I’m trying to do.”

Progressives who have looked forward to having two progressive women on the council—Alexis Mercedes Rinck just took office after beating appointed councilmember Tanya Woo in November—may feel betrayed by Morales’ decision. Teresa Mosqueda, who also left the council early (Woo took over her former position when Mosqueda won a county council seat in 2023), tried to talk her out of it. But Morales said two progressives would still be outnumbered at least until the next big council election in 2027, and she’s unconvinced that she, personally, could ever be effective with a council that blames her for every decision made by the previous council.

“I’m excited about Alexis being here. I think she’s going to do great things,” Morales said. “But even if [I had stayed], we’re still two people, and together, we’re not going to have the power to do very much.” That includes Councilmember Cathy Moore’s proposed capital gains tax, which Joy Hollingsworth and Dan Strauss seem likely to oppose if it starts to look too viable. (Hollingsworth already switched her vote, making Strauss the swing if it ever comes up again). And, she added, “there’s just my personal responsibility to my family, my mental health, [and] my staff. My team have been treated very shabbily” by other council offices, she said.

Morales doesn’t recall the specific incident that made her start questioning whether it made sense to stay or go, but there have been plenty to choose from over the past 11 months—starting with the new council’s decision, in January, to appoint the person Morales had just defeated, Tanya Woo, to a citywide council seat.

The council’s decision to ignore the will of the voters and award themselves a supermajority was widely viewed as a foregone conclusion. Since then, Council President Sara Nelson—who endorsed all six new members, including now-former councilmember Woo, and campaigned on their behalf—has worked to shore up her united front, forcing central staff members to edit reports to be more favorable to the majority perspective, and boxing Morales out of policy discussions.

Since the beginning of her second term, several of Morales’ new council colleagues have treated her as the personification of the previous city council, conflating Morales—who, until Rinck joined the council last month, was the council’s lone progressive—with socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant.

The vilification has often been open and explicit.

In April, for example, new Councilmember Cathy Moore accused Morales of telling the media that her colleagues were “evil… corporate shills” because they opposed her Connected Communities pilot, which would provide density bonuses to some small, community-based affordable housing developers. There is no evidence Morales ever said anything of the sort. It does, however, sound a lot like Sawant, who left the council last year.

Morales worked on the pilot project for more than two years and held five committee meetings to inform her new colleagues about what it would do. But, she said, “it was very clear from the beginning that they had no interest in learning about it. They were just not going to support it. And then Cathy accused me of saying things about her that I had never said, conflating me with Kshama. And that’s been sort of the theme all year—they think I’m Kshama, and they treat me like Kshama.”

Later in the year, when Morales urged the council to release the full $20 million from a 2023 JumpStart tax increase earmarked for student mental health, new council members lashed out at her, accusing her of failing to do due diligence and using her as a stand-in for the terrible “previous council” (which, Morales noted, passed the JumpStart tax that saves the city budget every year, along with other progressive policies—like raising gig workers’ minimum wage—that remain too popular for the new council to easily overturn.)

New Councilmember Maritza Rivera said the vote to fund student mental health last year was “arbitrary” and ill-informed, while her fellow newcomer, Bob Kettle, accused the previous council of having an “absolute lack of good governance… lack of coordination, lack of anything, really.” Rob Saka, another newbie, piled on, claiming the old council had “no rational basis” for supporting the funding increase.

Continue reading “City Councilmember Tammy Morales Will Leave the Council In January” →

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Mental Health

Council Rejects Full 2024 Funding for Youth Mental Health, Calls Previous Council Lazy and Irresponsible
A young man testified in front of the City Council on Tuesday.

Bob Kettle accused Tammy Morales of failing to do due diligence before proposing legislation to release funds collected from a payroll tax increase this year.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council narrowly rejected a proposal from Councilmember Tammy Morales to release the full $20 million that’s supposed to be collected this year to fund youth mental health services. The previous council voted 6-3 to approve an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax for this purpose.

Dan Strauss, who voted with Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle against Morales’ proposal, then introduced an amendment that added $2.25 million for gun violence prevention to the $10 million the council has agreed to spend this year; the remaining funds will go back into the city’s JumpStart fund and can be used to address the city’s $260 million budget deficit.

The vote was virtually identical to the one the council, convened as the nine-member budget committee, took last week. What was different was the level of vitriol council members directed at both the original tax increase, adopted by a previous council that the new council has turned into a synecdoche for government waste.

Rivera kicked things off by asking Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington a series of leading questions about the actions of the previous council in order to establish that that council, unlike this one, “didn’t do the research,” chose $20 million as “an arbitrary figure that was not actually needed,” and “did not get guidance from mental health professionals.”

Saka (who ultimately voted for the proposal) piled on, saying there had been “no rational basis” for increasing the JumpStart tax to fund programs to improve student mental health, a comment that prompted astonished looks from some of the kids who had just testified about how such programs had benefited them.

Then Kettle jumped in, saying the previous council (which also included Lisa Herbold, Alex Pedersen, Debora Juarez, and Teresa Mosqueda, now on the King County Council) had shown an “absolute lack of good governance… lack of coordination, lack of anything, really.” Kettle then launched into a little interrogative exercise with Washington and Human Services Department director Tanya Kim, who were both on hand to answer questions.

Speaking about Morales as if she was not sitting right there, Kettle asked both executive staffers to confirm that Morales had not coordinated with the mayor or HSD when drafting her legislation to release the $10 million to the Department of Education and Early Learning. (Council members are part of the legislative branch, and are not required to seek approval from the executive branch before proposing legislation). Then, he turned to Council Central Staff director Ben Noble, who contradicted him—saying that “yes,” Morales did work with Central Staff on the legislation.

Kettle didn’t appear to like that answer, and corrected Noble, saying he clearly only meant yes “in the sense of getting the amendment into the system, calendaring, you know, into the system.” Noble responded that in fact, central staff put the same work into Morales’ amendment that they would put into any amendment, including an analysis of the underlying policy. Kettle switched tacks again, summarizing for Noble: “So, clearly, not with the executive, the people who have to carry out what needs to be done.”

It was a weird moment, made weirder by all the leading questions that gave the mayor’s office an opening to talk about how personally insulted and hurt Harrell and his staff were by the suggestion that the mayor would use mental health funding to close the budget gap.

“The mayor cares about this issue very greatly,” Washington said, “and so to just hear it put out there like he’s just going to take this money for mental health and [use it to] close the deficit gap was hard for me to hear, and very untrue, because he doesn’t have the power to do that.”

As the central staff analysis of the underlying legislation notes, in the absence of explicit action by the council to spend the full $20 million, “the remaining $10 million in appropriation authority will go unused, and the funds will either remain in the JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax Fund balance and be available for spending in 2025 or future years, or the appropriation could be abandoned, and the monies diverted to other eligible purposes in 2024.”

City Council, public safety

Council Members Approve Fine for Street Racing, Claiming It Will “Deter” Racing, Save Lives
Charlie XCX would never.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council approved a bill this week that will impose fines on people who engage in or watch street racing, with fines that begin at $500 and range up to $1,500.

Supporters of the bill, originally sent to the council by City Attorney Ann Davison, vastly overstated its likely impact, suggesting that the “deterrent” threat of fines would not only prevent people from racing in the first place, but save lives that might otherwise be lost to gun violence. (A young man was recently shot and killed at a street racing event on Alki).

“Too many people are dying,” Councilmember Rob Saka said. Addressing a public commenter who raised concerns about the constitutional rights of spectators, who can now be ticketed and fined for being present at a street race, Saka noted that the city of Kent has long had a similar law, “and I think this bill … strikes the right balance between the competing demands of constitutional rights and the rights of people who want their community safe across the city.”

Bill sponsor Bob Kettle, who represents downtown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia, praised Saka’s amendment creating graduated fines, rather than the fine of $500 per incident Kettle originally proposed, “because checking in [with] the community, you know, $500 wasn’t enough to deter. … And we have to have that deterrence point. Otherwise, more people are going to lose their lives.” The legislation also received an emergency designation, meaning it will go into effect immediately.

Street racing is already illegal under state law, and has been for more than 100 years; reckless driving, which encompasses street racing, is illegal on both the state and local levels. Under these laws, people convicted of illegal racing can be fined up to $5,000, jailed for up to 364 days, and lose their license. Compared to these existing potential penalties, a fine of $500, or up to $1,500, is fairly minor.

Tanya Woo, who co-sponsored the bill, said there are already legal outlets for people who “feel the need to express themselves with speed,” like racetracks and official races, and suggested that people “leave these high risk maneuvers [like drifting and burnouts] to the professionals in a controlled environment.”

Councilmember Tammy Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle, said that what the city needs isn’t more criminalization of something that’s already illegal and subject to significant penalties, “but what we do need is safe places for young adults to go. We need better lighting on our streets. We need to design our streets to make it difficult for drivers to race on them, and that’s why we just approved a $1.5 billion transportation levy package to begin to address all of that other infrastructure that’s needed.”

Morales cast the lone vote against the bill.