The process of replacing Sally Clark on the city council has been weird from the start. The timeline is super-short (part of that is because of requirements in the city charter), council members haven’t publicly discussed why they supported the applicants they did, and the meeting for the public to weigh in is at 4 p.m. on a Friday.
Then there’s how purely non-political all of this has felt. Even as the council continues to split into factions and we’re in the middle of one of the most batshit election years ever, Council President Tim Burgess seems set on keeping this whole thing as boring as humanly possible.
Council Member Kshama Sawant isn’t having it.
On Tuesday, she sent out these questions to all the finalists, asking them to respond by Friday, when they will present to the council and the public can comment. Sawant’s office says she’ll make the responses public as she gets them.
1. Do you support rent control?
2. Do you support enacting the maximum legal linkage fee on developers, estimated to be close to the equivalent of discounting 10 percent of apartments to affordable rates?
3. What do you think is the most urgent public decision facing council members in 2015?
4. How should Seattle address the growth in homelessness?
5. Do you support increasing the penalties and remedies for wage theft?
6. Do you think human services in Seattle are adequately funded? If not, how would you fund them?
7. What is your opinion of Bertha and the tunnel project?
8. In light of the gender pay gap, would you have voted for or against the tip penalty in the $15-an-hour minimum wage law?
9. Do you think Black Lives Matter, and do you think it is important for politicians to say, “Black Lives Matter”?
10. Do you support the business head tax, capital gains tax, and other forms of progressive taxation?
If the finalists answer these questions—which they should do if they want to be taken seriously—it’ll be a window into how they might vote on some of the issues coming before the council this year, but it’ll also give us a sense of where they fall on the Sawant-versus-Burgess spectrum. (Though we can already tell some of that based on who supports them. Frontrunner John Okamoto, for example, has the support of every council member except Sawant.)
Sawant has also invited the finalists to speak at the housing affordability forum she and Council Member Nick Licata are hosting tonight. Their familiarity with housing issues is perhaps the biggest indicator of how ready finalists are for this job, since they’re likely to take Clark’s spot as chair of the housing affordability committee.
At Friday’s meeting, the council will question each finalist for up to 15 minutes, so expect to see Sawant especially grill those who don’t respond to her e-mail. Again, that hearing is at prime public meeting time for no one, 4 p.m. Friday, in council chambers.
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