It all came down to Bruce Harrell. After two rounds of voting, the Seattle City Council appointed longtime city bureaucrat and former Port of Seattle chief administrator John Okamoto.

The council's more activist wing—Kshama Sawant, Mike O'Brien, and Nick Licata—had supported Low Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee and longtime union activist and former HUD employee Sharon Maeda. Their more centrist counterparts, Tim Burgess, Sally Bagshaw, Tom Rasmussen, and Jean Godden, supported Okamoto. Harrell, who didn't disclose his vote until the moment he cast it, went first for Seattle King County NAACP economic development chair Sheley Secrest. That meant no finalist got a majority, so they voted again. Burgess and Harrell exchanged a few whispered words, and on the second vote, Harrell joined the majority for Okamoto.

Okamoto will serve most of the remaining term of Sally Clark, who left the council earlier this month to take a new job at the University of Washington. (Whoever is elected this fall will take the seat once the election results are finalized on November 24.) Burgess asked that applicants for the job not plan to run for election this fall.

The meeting set up a clear division between the two wings of the council and again highlighted Kshama Sawant's willingness to not be Seattle nice. While she was joined by Licata and O'Brien in supporting someone other than Okamoto, she was the loudest in attacking Okamoto's time at the Port (more about that here), his role as part of the "status quo," and some claims that he and other candidates didn't have political agendas.

"Everyone has an agenda," she said. "Just some people lie about it."

Supporters of Okamoto praised his potential to get started at the job with little or no learning curve and his recent gig as interim director of the city's Human Services Department as proof that he can smoothly take over the housing affordability committee, which Clark chaired. Council member Sally Bagshaw said she supported him because she was looking for someone to govern with "logic and facts, not emotions."

In a meeting with reporters after his appointment, Okamoto said getting the job "feels somewhat like a dream" and—even while calling Sawant's criticisms of him "disappointing"—committed to working with the entire nine-member council.

This post has been updated.