The race for downtown’s District 7 City Council seat now has a frontrunner. Jim Pugel, a former SPD cop and interim police chief, entered the race today with prominent endorsements from the city’s political insiders, police reform advocates, public health and homelessness response leaders, and the county sheriff.
Pugel was surrounded by some of those leaders Tuesday morning at a press conference in Pioneer Square, where he said he was running his campaign on a commitment to strike compromises on the council and make Seattle more affordable.
“We need council leadership committed to bringing working families—our teachers, our nurses, our service employees, our firefighters and police officers—up to be able to live here in this great city,” Pugel said.
Pugel was joined by Lisa Daugaard, a prominent police reform advocate and executive director of the Public Defender Association; Dan Malone, a homelessness response advocate with the Downtown Emergency Service Center; and gun reform advocate Renee Hopkins. Pugel also has the support of King County Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht, and County Councilmember Larry Gossett, according to a press release.
District 7 has become one of the most competitive City Council races this year after Councilmember Sally Bagshaw announced that she would not seek reelection. Council elections are in November of this year and six candidates have already announced they are running to replace Bagshaw.
Pugel’s impressive coalition of support was missing one notable organization on Tuesday: the Seattle Police Department (SPD). Pugel was an SPD cop for over 30 years, including a stint as the interim police chief in 2014, before being pushed out of the department by former Mayor Ed Murray. Pugel had prominently disagreed with the Seattle Police Officer’s Guild on officer discipline cases and Murray’s move was considered a cave to the union, which had endorsed Murray.
Pugel said he is still friends with many SPD cops but said they couldn’t make it to Tuesday’s press conference.
“They’re busy, some certainly may not care for my candidacy for whatever reason and you will have to ask them,” Pugel told me.
Daugaard, who is a member of the city’s Community Police Commission, said that Pugel has a history of changing SPD policies and directly partnering with reform advocates, actions that she said have “made some people uncomfortable” in the department.
“Jim is a unique police leader. He has very strong and deep relationships in the department but he has pissed some people off by endorsing I-940,” Daugaard said. “Jim does unsettle the specific expectations of who can be allies and who can partner on solutions. That’s exactly why he’s such an important figure in our city, because he’s like the living embodiment of ‘no permanent friends, no permanent foes.’ He works with anyone who is serious about finding solutions.”
Pugel (pronounced like you replace the “t” in Puget with an “l”) was born in Seattle, and he said his parents still live in the Mt. Baker home they purchased in the 1950s. He currently lives in Queen Anne. After being forced out of SPD by Murray, he worked as as a deputy chief at the King County Sheriff’s Office. Pugel was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2017 and went through eight months of treatment that ended in May of 2018. He said his cancer is now in remission and that his oncologist told him he’s “got enough gas in the tank” to serve on the City Council.
Pugel said he identifies as a Democrat and would be using the city’s Democracy Vouchers, which provide public financing for council campaigns. When I asked him if he was a socialist, he said “I’m not quite sure what that means,” which, I think we can assume, means he’s not a socialist (unlike at least three other people running for council this year).
Pugel told me in an interview before his press conference that he supports the city’s effort to bring more housing to Seattle by “upzoning,” or increasing the allowed height of buildings. But he declined to support the specifics of the city’s current Mandatory Housing Affordability plan, which has drawn critics from the wealthy residential homeowners in his district.
“I’m not down in the nitty gritty, but I’ve been listening, not talking to, but listening to a lot of people, so I’m just listening right now,” Pugel said.
One of the biggest issues that will face District 7 is figuring out what to do with the aging Magnolia Bridge. The bridge was weakened in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake and needs to be replaced, but the city hasn’t saved any money for its replacement, which will cost between $350 and $400 million, according to the Seattle Times. When I spoke with Pugel before his Tuesday press conference, he didn’t have any specific details on what he thinks the city should do with the bridge.
The city’s new police union contract drew intense protest from Seattle’s police reform community, with people like Daugaard and the Community Police Commission claiming Mayor Jenny Durkan had negotiated a contract that rolled back significant reforms to police accountability. The council voted to approve the contract last year. Pugel declined to say if he would have voted to approve the contract if he was on the council.
“I don’t know all of the details [on the contract],” Pugel said. “I strongly support the Community Police Commission. There is the Joint Labor Management Council that is staffed by the council and the mayor and they are supposed to monitor everything that is going on in the negotiations. To that extent, I will never blame any union for getting everything or trying to get everything they want.”
We’ll see if the voters of District 7 decide they want to send a former police officer to the council, albeit one with more civilians than cops lining up to support him.
