- Kelly O
Albert Shen is a skilled political climber. He earned the governor’s appointment in 2009 to the Seattle Community Colleges board. Meanwhile, he has served as a board member for the Puget Sound Susan G. Komen Foundation, proving his loyalty to women’s issues, and last year, he joined the Obama campaign’s national finance committee, raising more than $100,000 for the president’s reelection and earning his stripes in the Democratic Party.
It seems natural that Shen, 46, would now run for election to city hall. “It’s what I want to do; it’s what I want to accomplish,” he says.
Although Shen initially planned to run for mayor, he’s settled on the Seattle City Council, taking on Mike O’Brien, one of four council members defending their seats this fall. O’Brien is the council’s most liberal member, a freshman who has sponsored successful, although controversial, bills to reform elections, ban plastic shopping bags, and create an opt-out registry for yellow pages (the yellow-pages companies sued the city, requiring the city to pay out a $50,000 settlement, but a registry was ultimately implemented). Still, Shen says, “It’s not about him,” adding there is “no particular reason” he ran against O’Brien.
That line of defense makes it difficult to discern what Shen would do differently than his opponent.
When pressed on agenda specifics, Shen says he intends to bring his expertise managing storm-water runoff as an engineering consult to the council when it begins a cleanup of the polluted Duwamish River. (A virtuous goal—although O’Brien’s environmental bona fides as the former director of the state’s Sierra Club chapter suggest he would also be a strong advocate for river cleanup.)
Shen argues that Seattle needs him because the council is currently all white.
“The council has no ethnic diversity right now, and with my background as an Asian American… I want to bring that diverse perspective to the city council, and I think that’s been lost recently,” Shen says.
The council actually does have a member of color: Bruce Harrell, who is half Japanese and half African American. When I tell Shen, he says, “I stand corrected on that.”