Tag: Tanya Woo

Elections, Mayor Wilson, Police

Mayor Replaces More Harrell Department Heads, SPOG President Endorses Mini-Mike, Tanya Woo (Maybe) Rises Again

1. Mayor Katie Wilson announced two new department heads on Friday. She’s replacing her predecessor Bruce Harrell’s finance director, Jamie Carnell, with city and county budget veteran Dwight Dively; and she’s replacing Harrell’s Office of Economic Development director, Markham McIntyre, with his deputy, Alicia Teel, on an “acting” basis.

Dively was budget director at the city until 2010, when then-mayor Mike McGinn replaced him with a former King County deputy budget director, Beth Goldberg. (McGinn said Dively had failed to adequately plan for the budget shortfalls of the Great Recession).

Then-King County Executive Dow Constantine snapped Dively up, and he remained in charge of the county’s budget until the election of Girmay Zahilay, who assigned him to help head up the Department of Community and Human Services after ousting Kelly Rider, who was head of DCHS for a little less than two years. Many inside the city bemoaned Dively’s ouster and considered his move a trade in the county’s favor (although Goldberg had her fans!)

McIntyre spent a decade in various executive jobs at the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce (which recently changed its own leadership, hiring former state legislator and state Department of Commerce director Joe Nguyen to replace Rachel Smith). McIntyre brought Teel over from the Chamber, where she worked for more than 15 years. (Editor’s note: This story originally said McIntyre served under Jenny Durkan, which is not the case. We regret the error.)

McIntyre was a Harrell campaign stalwart. PubliCola reported last year that he used an internal City of Seattle Teams chat to ask for city employees’ personal contact information on behalf of the Harrell campaign; those who provided their info received solicitations to support Harrell “in the home stretch.”

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2. The Tanya Woo rumor mill chugged back into operation this week. Unconfirmed, but we’re hearing that the onetime Seattle councilmember (appointed to a citywide seat after losing to Tammy Morales in District 2, Woo ran a second time, losing to Alexis Mercedes Rinck), has reportedly been testing the waters for another campaign—this time aiming her sights at the state.

We heard this week that Woo may run for the state house seat that will be vacated by 37th District representative Chipalo Street, who recently declared his candidacy for the state senate seat being vacated by Rebecca Saldaña, who’s running for King County Council Position 2, occupied until recently by now-King County Executive Girmay Zahilay. (Zahilay’s longtime chief of staff, Rhonda Lewis, is in the position on a temporary basis). Seattle Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa recently announced she is also “considering” a run for Zahilay’s former council seat.

3. After setting right-wing activist hearts aflame by making the baseless claim that Mayor Katie Wilson has ordered cops to stop arresting people for drug crimes, Seattle Police Officers Guild president Mike Solan announced on his “Hold the Line” podcast last month that he won’t seek reelection.

Apparently, Solan has already selected his heir apparent—Ken Loux, a 10-year SPD officer whose talking points suggest SPOG is under siege by powerful enemies, rather than coddled by city officials who just handed the union a 42 percent raise.

“Make no mistake: Seattle’s politics have veered sharply left, unleashing a storm that threatens to dismantle everything we’ve built brick by brick,” Loux says in his campaign video over shaky images of Mayor Wilson and City Councilmembers Dionne Foster and Alexis Mercedes Rinck. “SPOG is staring down its most brutal years yet—a relentless assault on our unity, our resources, and our resolve.”

Solan’s headshot looms above Loux’s image on his website, making the younger man look like the Son of Solan. A Mini-Mike, if you will.

City Council, Elections, gender, immigration, Trump

Tanya Woo Tries Again (UPDATE: Nope); Advocates Tell Council How they Can Help Limit “Existential” Threats from Trump
Her again: Tanya Woo has filed for the city’s public financing program after losing elections in 2023 and 2024.

1. UPDATE As of Monday night, Woo’s name no longer appeared on the city’s campaign website, where it appeared briefly on Monday afternoon, or or on the city’s democracy voucher page.

Tanya Woo is apparently trying a fourth time to get on the city council, after voters rejected her in 2023 (when she lost to Tammy Morales in District 2) and 2024 (when she lost to Alexis Mercedes Rinck for a citywide council seat.) In between those campaigns, the newly elected centrist council appointed her to citywide Position 9, in a direct rebuke to the voters who had just chosen Morales over her.

Woo has not filed for office yet, according to campaign records, but she is listed as a candidate for the position on the city’s Democracy Vouchers website, where she has indicated she will be seeking public funds for her campaign. Candidates for district council seats must collect 150 signatures and campaign donations of at least $10 to qualify.

After winning appointment from her fellow centrists in a pantomime of public process that wasted city time and resources vetting seven candidates who never stood a chance, Woo had an unremarkable 10 months on the council, casting votes in favor of the council’s new law-and-order agenda but proposing no significant legislation of her own, beyond a dead-on-arrival proposal to create special “no-protest zones” around councilmembers’ homes.

Woo also claimed to be the victim of a “xenophobic” hate crime when someone wrote “Tanya Woo hates black people!” and “Fuck Tanya Woo” on the outside of the apartment building her family owns in the Chinatown-International District. During the budget process, Woo opposed Morales’ proposal to study anti-displacement measures for at-risk homeowners as part of the city’s comprehensive plan—saying the proposed environmental impact study (EIS) would “help inform, but not do what we think it’s going to do, based on what I’ve been hearing recently” before asking what an EIS was.

The other candidates who have also filed for Position 2, currently filled by “caretaker” appointee Mark Solomon, are Bruce Harrell transportation advisor Adonis Ducksworth, assistant city attorney Eddie Lin, and real-estate investor Takayo Ederer; all three previously sought appointment to the open seat.

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2. Rinck convened the first meeting of the council’s new Select Committee on Federal Administration and Policy Changes last week, bringing advocates for reproductive rights, the LGBTQ+ community, and immigrants together to discuss the thrriskeats the Trump administration poses to vulnerable people in Seattle.

The threats are well known. Trans people risk losing access to gender-affirming care across the country, and even in Washington state, there are laws on the books that allow forced outing of LGBTQ+ kids and students seeking gender-affirming care.

Health care, similarly, is the line, as Trump threatens to pull  federal Medicaid funding from any provider that offers abortions or gender-affirming care. As Courtney Normand, director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Washington, noted at least week’s meeting. “About 40 percent of all Planned Parenthood patients are Medicaid patients, so [the loss of Medicaid funding] is an existential threat to our ability to be safety-net health care providers at all in Washington and across the country.”

For undocumented immigrants in Seattle, the threat is similarly existential. Although Seattle is a “welcoming city” for immigrants—meaning, primarily, that city employees, including cops, aren’t allowed to inquire about anyone’s immigration status—ICE raids have already hit the city, according to the immigrants’ rights advocates on last week’s panel.

“We received reports of ice appearing in people’s workplaces, including a restaurant in downtown Seattle,” Vanessa Reyes, policy manager for the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, said. “We’ve gotten reports of people getting deported very quickly after detention, being sent to detentions in other states, and those who have sent to the detention center in Tacoma reporting unsafe and unsanitary conditions.”

In many cases, the solutions, where they exist, are at the state level—through lawsuits by the state Attorney General’s Office, expanded shield laws for people who help others get health care they can’t access in their own states, and laws protecting students at school, including needed revisions to the so-called parental rights bill, a right-wing initiative the state senate passed unanimously last year.

At the city level, though, the advocates who spoke last week proposed changing laws and policies the current city council just put in place, like new live camera surveillance, expansion of automated license plate readers, and the use of police to crack down on people with addiction, men who pay for sex, and people who commit crimes that are often linked to poverty, like shoplifting.

“One thing that’s really going to have a negative impact on our community members are the ways in which people can be subject to mandatory detention without bond, just for having been arrested for a crime such as shoplifting—not even convicted, but just potentially being accused and arrested, Jenny Mashek, directing attorney with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said.

Sami Alloy, the interim executive director of Pro-Choice Washington, added that she wanted to see the city “curtailing the surveillance of Seattle residents” by limiting the use of technologies like automatic license plate readers,” which could potentially be used to undermine the state’s shield law.

And Taylor Farley, the executive director of Queer Power Alliance, said, “We need to maintain and strengthen our local tenant protections, not to roll back what we’ve already put in [place].  We’ve put those protections in because they were needed at the time, and they’re still needed and they’re going to be needed for the future.”

The council has called for more policing, more surveillance, and more emphasis on arrests for low-level crimes, including banishment orders that restrict people from going into certain areas of the city even if they haven’t been convicted of a crime. The council is also considering rollbacks to existing tenant protections, including the winter eviction moratorium, maximum late fees, and the “first in time” rule that requires landlords to rent to the first qualified candidate.

Councilmember Cathy Moore, who supported all the policies advocates identified as areas of concern, disputed some of the advocates’ characterizations before asking them about concrete actions the council could take to help fund or advocate for things like gender-affirming care. “We don’t always agree, and I would certainly heartily disagree with some of the representations that have been made, but I’m not going to take this opportunity to go into that,” Moore said.

City Council, Elections, Morning Fizz

Lived Experience Coalition Says KCRHA Owes Them $365,000; Tanya Woo Proposes No-Protest Zones Around Politicians’ Houses

1. In a Q&A with a North Seattle neighborhood group, Seattle City Councilmember Tanya Woo said that if she’s elected in November, she’ll propose legislation to create “buffer zones” in the public space around local elected officials’ houses where people will not be allowed to protest.

The legislation Woo contemplates would establish “a set distance or buffer zone to protect personal safety while ensuring protests take place in appropriate public spaces where free speech can be exercised without infringing on the well-being of individuals.” Police would be on hand to make sure protesters stay inside officially sanctioned protest areas—which, practically speaking, would be in front of other people’s homes.

“I fully support the right to protest,” she told Neighborhoods for Smart Streets, which originally formed to oppose bike lanes in Northeast Seattle, but “I also believe there are limits when it comes to personal safety and privacy. Protesting at the homes of elected officials crosses that line.”

Woo is not, strictly speaking, an elected official—the council, which took a more conservative turn in the last election, appointed her to a citywide position after she lost to District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales, who is now the lone left on the council.

Seattle has a long history of protests on the public streets and sidewalks outside elected officials’ homes, and of enforcing existing laws against harassment and violence when people cross legal lines. In 2012, police investigated when protesters through rocks through the window of then-mayor Mike McGinn’s home in Greenwood. In contrast,  no arrests were made when activists with the group SHARE camped in public areas outside council members’ houses, starting with now-Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, to demand funding for bus tickets.

The most famous “no-protest zone” in Seattle’s history occurred during the WTO protests in 1999, and led to years of lawsuits, costing the city millions of dollars in payouts and legal fees.

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2. Members of the Lived Experience Coalition, an organization that was once closely linked with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, say the KCRHA owes them more than $365,000.

Coalition members and advocates, including several who sit on the KCRHA’s implementation board, said it was imperative that the KCRHA pay the Lived Experience Coalition what they say they are owed. “I don’t understand how a organization can be stood up to support or center lived experience voices, use lived experience to do work, and then dismiss them and not pay them,” said implementation board and LEC member Zsa Zsa Floyd. “It saddens me that we become so political and so money-hungry that we step on, step over, and dismiss folks … who have done work.”

“It’s not just about the money that’s owed to us, it’s about respect and recognition for the invaluable contributions we make,” LEC member Courtney Love told the board. “When we don’t receive the support we are owed, it undermines not only our efforts, but also the trust we strive to build within our community.

The dispute stems from work the LEC did in 2022 and 2023, for which the KCRHA contends they did not have a formal contract. The work included standing up a Youth Action Board—a requirement for the KCRHA to apply for a new federal youth homelessness pilot program—as well as efforts to get unsheltered people indoors in the winter of 2022-2023 and work to create a new ombuds office for the agency.

During last week’s meeting, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison said the LEC had no written contract with KCRHA to do the work for which they’re now demanding payment. The LEC disputes this, saying that an email from former KCRHA staffer Meg Barclay, in which Barclay assured the LEC they would commit to paying them for the work they did in 2023, constituted an informal, but official, contract.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said agency officials have repeatedly told the LEC that the group “didn’t have a contract with KCRHA and are not owed for the submitted reimbursements. We’ve meticulously reviewed the documentation and determined they were reimbursed by Building Changes [a separate nonprofit that served as the LEC’s fiscal sponsor] with the exception of a small amount that individuals would need to submit documentation for.”

Building Changes, which is no longer the LEC’s fiscal sponsor, declined to comment on its payments to the LEC.

But a representative for the LEC told PubliCola the LEC never received outside compensation for their work, saying the payment from Building Changes came out of the LEC’s own reserves. The LEC and Building Changes parted ways in 2023 amid a dispute over who was to blame when the LEC ran out of money to run an emergency hotel-based shelter program, which the KCRHA took over in April of that year.

“Building Changes was our fiscal sponsor at the time and utilized LEC’s reserves to pay folks,” the LEC representative said. “It is absolutely an outrageous claim and a deflection that Building Changes utilized their funds to pay LEC. …During the 2022 contract year, before LEC had any reserves, Building Changes halted payments instead of allowing LEC to utilize their reserves. LEC learned from this and ensured that we had funds to cover expenses given KCRHA’s not being timely with contracts.”

The implementation board agreed last week to discuss the payment dispute at its next meeting, on November 13. The board is under a time crunch: Under a new interlocal agreement adopted by Seattle and King County, the board will dissolve at the end of the year and be replaced by the agency’s governing board, which is made up of current elected officials from around the region.

City Council, Elections

Alexis Mercedes Rinck Had a Good Election Night

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Councilmember Tanya Woo, appointed to the citywide Position 8 seat last year after narrowly losing the race for District 2 to incumbent Tammy Morales, trailed behind progressive challenger Alexis Mercedes Rinck on election night, with 41.4 percent of the vote to Rinck’s 46.6.

Rinck’s vote total would likely be higher in a (purely theoretical) one-on-one contest, because the other challengers—including transit advocate Saunatina Sanchez, who pulled 4.4 percent and ended the night in third—are also progressive, which means their supporters are more likely to back Rinck in the general election.

Woo, who has not proposed any substantive legislation in her short time in office, raised slightly more money than Rinck (around $225,000 to Rinck’s $192,000). Rinck received the endorsements of every local Democratic group, while Woo was supported by seven of her council colleagues–including the five newcomers elected last year and not including Morales, who’s supporting Rinck.

Historically, progressive candidates gain several points after election night as later ballots, generally from younger and more progressive voters, trail in. If the results for Woo and Rinck moved the exact same amount as last year’s Woo/Morales primary results, we could expect to see a final result of Rinck in the lead with 50.74 percent and Woo trailing at 38.55.

Obviously, there are many factors that shape any individual election. And it’s certainly conceivable that Woo and her supporters could rally between now and November. On the other hand, Presidential election years tend to produce high turnout, and in Seattle, that typically means more of those younger and more progressive voters, who don’t always vote in local elections.

With such a slim record and so little time on the council, it’s difficult to know why Woo ended up with such a limp result. One reason could be simply that Rinck has a better ground game—she seems to be damn near everywhere, and her social media presence has been consistently strong. Rinck’s energetic campaign could be fueling enthusiasm that Woo just can’t muster in a citywide race; her campaign against Morales, remember, was based mostly on her work as a neighborhood activist in Chinatown, which makes sense for a district race but doesn’t necessarily translate to citywide support.

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It’s also conceivable that even-year voters are just dramatically more left-leaning than the people who vote in odd years—that if this election was happening in 2025, the results would be reversed. If so, it’s a sign that when more people vote in local races, the city gets more progressive results. Which, if true, means that we really should move to even-year elections, so that the people we elect to local office better represent the views of the entire electorate.

Another theory, the one I tend to believe, is that the new city council majority is overshooting their shot—treating their mostly narrow victories in 2023 as a massive mandate for throwback policies like criminalizing sex work, arresting drug users, banishing marginalized people from large swaths of the city, and using jail as a first-resort response to social problems.

Certainly, there’s a large constituency for this approach. There always has been, even during the era now misremembered as the time when everybody wanted to defund the police. People who want to create 200-square-block no-go zones for sex workers were not generally advocating for super-progressive policies four years ago just because it briefly became important for elected officials to say “Black Lives Matter.”

But I’m not sure those voters are thrilled with what they got for their votes—a council that appears anti-democratic, has failed to propose substantive policies that would meaningfully address any of the stuff they claim to be concerned about, including addiction, sex trafficking, and “disorderly” homeless people in public view.

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe that was the mandate, and this election is the anomaly. But… did you see that meeting where the council kicked everybody out so they could go huddle in their offices? They looked pretty scared of the public to me. Maybe they’re starting to wonder if their retro policies are quite as popular as they assumed.

City Council, Elections

Seattle Nice: Is Seattle Still in its Backlash Era?

By Erica C. Barnett 

The 2024 general election for a citywide seat on the Seattle City Council will most likely pit UW state policy planner Alexis Mercedes Rinck against six-month Position 8 incumbent Tanya Woo. Woo was part of the centrist class of 2023 candidates who argued that the previous, more progressive city council had supported dangerous policies, like “defund the police,” that contributed to problems like homeless encampments, “open-air” drug use, and an exodus from the Seattle Police Department. (Once more, for the record, Seattle never defunded the police department.)

Woo didn’t win her race for Council District 2 last year, but the new city council wasted no time in appointing her to citywide Position 8, previously held by progressive council member Teresa Mosqueda, who had moved on to the King County Council.

The Position 8 race will be on the ballot in a Presidential election year, which tend to draw out more progressive voters (and more voters in general) than odd-year local elections. On the other hand, Seattle’s new, more conservative council is still getting settled, and voters may not be ready yet for the inevitable backlash to the backlash. (Backlash/counterbacklash elections being an eternal cycle in Seattle politics.)

So, on this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we asked: Can a progressive challenger beat a member of the Class of 2023? Or are voters still waiting to see if the latest proposals to lock more people in jail, banish people accused of certain crimes from large swaths of the city, and renege on minimum-wage promises made to workers 10 years ago are effective? Listen to our lively discussion on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

City Council

Council Fizz: Moore To Propose “Prostitution Loitering” Bill, Anti-Woo Graffiti May Be Coming From Inside the Building

1. City Councilmember Cathy Moore will reportedly introduce legislation on Thursday that would reinstate a law, repealed unanimously by the previous City Council, banning “prostitution loitering” in places like Aurora Ave. N, where sex workers congregate. PubliCola reported on Moore’s intent to re-criminalize prostitution earlier this year.

The council repealed the laws against prostitution loitering and drug loitering after the Seattle Reentry Workgroup, established to come up with recommendations to help formerly incarcerated people reenter their communities, recommended repealing both laws on the grounds that they disproportionately harm people of color and that involvement in the criminal legal system “exacerbates already unmet needs.” Former city attorney Pete Holmes stopped prosecuting prostitution loitering even before the repeal, citing the findings of the Reentry Work Group.

Under the previous law, a person could be found guilty of prostitution loitering, a misdemeanor, “if he or she remains in a public place and intentionally solicits, induces, entices, or procures another to commit prostitution.” The council also repealed a similar law banning “drug loitering.”

Moore reportedly plans to introduce legislation to repeal a ban on winter evictions and the city’s landmark “first-in-time” law, which requires landlords to rent to the first qualified candidate. The first-in-time law, which passed unanimously in 2017, is intended to prevent landlords from discriminating against potential tenants because of their race, gender, age, or other protected characteristics.

Moore did not immediately respond to a request for comment; earlier this year, she said that re-introducing so-called Stay Out of Prostitution Areas (SOPAs) would help address sex trafficking, which she said was endemic on Aurora.

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2. A few weeks ago, City Councilmember Tanya Woo reported graffiti to the FBI that she and other councilmembers described as “hate speech”; the scrawled messages included “Fuck Tanya Woo/Get Her Out” and “Tanya Woo Hates Black People.” Councilmembers denounced the graffiti as racist, sexist, and xenophobic, and Woo said she was later threatened while walking in the area by two men who she believed were motivated to target her by the graffiti.

Woo noted that some of the graffiti was scrawled on a historic building and would be costly to remove—an oblique reference to the building her family owns, the Louisa Hotel apartment building. After our story ran, a reader sent us a photo they said was taken inside a stairwell at the Louisa apartments, showing a scrawled message, “Fuck Tanya Woo,” that looks strikingly similar to the ones found immediately outside the Louisa and on an outside wall of the building itself.

The fact that the graffiti was inside the building suggests that the person who wrote it might be someone who lives in the Louisa, rather than a random member of the public targeting Woo.

The reader also noted that a private company, United Marketing, Inc., recently took over management of the hotel from the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority. (Woo’s family owns the building and she frequently refers to herself as an affordable or workforce housing provider, but she is not involved in managing it.)

Prior to Juneteenth (June 19), which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, the apartment managers posted notices warning residents that “charcoal barbecues are not permitted anywhere on the property” and reminding them to “observe quiet time hours and no loud music at any time.” (Woo’s family owns the building and her campaign website notes that “my family and I operate a legacy restaurant and affordable housing complex,” but she is not involved in its day-to-day management.)

“Please assist your guests with being courteous to your neighbors with parking and observing the rules,” the notice said. According to the resident, a notice posted on the Fourth of July merely reminded residents that fireworks are illegal, and only the Juneteenth message included warnings about barbecue grills and rowdy guests.