Today, the Seattle City Council is going to choose a replacement for Sally Clark, who resigned earlier this month to take a job at the University of Washington. Council members have spent the weekend talking about who they support and they'll make their final pick at their full meeting today at 2 p.m. in council chambers.
I and other civic nerds spent four hours at City Hall on Friday night listening to the council interview the eight finalists for the position. It was mostly bureaucratic niceties, vague answers, and talk from finalists about how they "don't have an agenda," but we did get a glimpse into how prepared the candidates might be for the job.
As I've reported, the finalists are:
Jan Drago: City council member from 1994 to 2009 (including stints as council president and budget chair); King County Council member for a partial term in 2010.
Noel Frame: Outgoing director of Progressive Majority Washington; ran for a house seat representing the 36th District in 2012 against Port of Seattle commissioner Gael Tarleton.
Sharon Lee: Executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute; served on the mayor's task force on unsheltered homelessness; member of citizen group that recently laid out a suggested template of policies for the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda Committee (HALA).
Sharon Maeda: Former director of 21 Progress; almost got the seat back in 2006 when Clark was appointed.
David Moseley: Former assistant secretary of the Washington State Department of Transportation's ferries division; former city manager of Federal Way and Ellensburg.
John Okamoto: Former director of the Washington Education Association; led the city's human resources and engineering departments in the '90s; recently served as interim director of the city's Human Services Department.
Sheley Secrest: Former president and current economic development chair of the Seattle King County NAACP; currently a policy analyst for the Metropolitan Urban League of Seattle.
Alec Stephens: Retired civil rights lawyer; worked from 1997 to 2014 in diversity programs at Sound Transit.
Crosscut has video of each finalist's opening statement here and video of the full meeting is here, if you're into that sort of thing. But let me answer some of the major questions of the moment:
WHO APPEARS TO BE THE FRONTRUNNER?
With the exception of Kshama Sawant, none of the council members gave much indication in their questioning about which way they were leaning. But here's what we know.
John Okamoto got the most votes from council members to make the shortlist—every member except Sawant supported him—and Mayor Ed Murray's office confirms that when Okamoto contacted the mayor asking for advice, Murray encouraged him to apply. That makes him seem almost inevitable, but he was also vague and non-committal in his answers Friday. He is still undecided about linkage fees and answered council member Mike O'Brien's question about them by first rambling about how we need to improve access to education and affordable housing (duh) and then said he worried, "What are the unintended consequences of any kind of revenue transfer or wealth transfer?" In response to that ramble, council member Bruce Harrell told Okamoto, "That's probably how council member Clark would have answered that question." Zing!
Sharon Lee was the most specific and direct in her answers to the council questions, especially those about housing affordability. She's the founder and executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute and was part of a group of housing affordability advocates who put forward 15 pages of recommendations for housing policies earlier this year, including rent control and issuing $500 million in city bonds to build affordable housing on city-owned land. So, it's not surprising that she was ready to get specific on housing issues. What is surprising is that in the informal voting process in which the council narrowed down the original 43 applicants to the eight finalists, Lee only got the support of council members Harrell, Sawant, and Tom Rasmussen. If, as it has said, the council wants someone familiar with housing policy to takeover Clark's role as chair of the housing affordability committee, where's the love for the single most qualified candidate on that issue?
Noel Frame got six votes to forward her to the finalists round and gave a compelling introduction about life experiences that she said would make her a good representative for people who need a voice in city government. "I am a survivor of sexual abuse," she told the council members. "I am somebody who manages my own mental health with medication every single day." Later in her remarks, she also made clear: "Today's really not about me. It's about who I represent." But her answers on policy questions were often vague, and she doesn't have much direct experience with housing policy.
In the selection of finalists, Sharon Maeda was a favorite of the council's leftist wing—Sawant, Mike O'Brien, and Nick Licata—and also garnered support from Harrell. On Friday, Maeda, who said she'd be the first Japanese-American woman on the council, told the council she supports using city bonds to fund new affordable housing. "If we move forward without a comprehensive housing strategy that goes from tent cities to market-rate housing," she said, "no amount of human services, pay equity, education, transportation or environmental programs, local hire, or public safety advances will be enough to ensure that Seattle continues to be the best place to live and work." After multiple questions from Sawant about enforcement of the city's new minimum wage law, Maeda said she would support penalties for repeat offenders. (The city's Office of Labor Standards plans to not charge fees for first violations during the first year, but says it will for repeat offenses.)
Like Okamoto, two others could get more support from the centrists on the council. David Moseley, a 40-year bureaucrat, may get a nod since he's on the mayor's housing affordability committee, but certainly not with Sawant's help. (See his thoughts on the minimum wage and the tunnel below.) You guys also liked him in that legally binding Slog poll the other day, so that's something.
Jan Drago, the former council member, is a fitting "caretaker" type, but seemed unprepared and vague during her presentation. To address housing affordability, she suggested annexing White Center. Huh.
WAIT A SECOND, WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH OKAMOTO AND THE PORT OF SEATTLE?
Okamoto worked as Chief Administrative Officer of the port from 2003-2008. (That means he oversaw public affairs, tourism, government relations, HR, labor relations, and other departments, according to his résumé.) Those years were full of controversies at the port, and people have been whispering about that ever since he emerged as a seeming front-runner, but Okamoto wasn't directly implicated in the 2007 Dinsmore scandal—in which an outgoing port CEO was almost paid a $340,000 salary for a year after his retirement—or the 2008 fraud investigation, which found a string of bad behavior, including, as the Seattle Times reported then, that "a Port of Seattle employee leaked sensitive documents to a major contractor who later made an 'astonishing' 30 percent profit on a $125 million construction job at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport."
However, Okamoto was named—or, at least, the position he held was called out—in a 2007 review of port police wrongdoing that found the port administration ignored red flags and allowed the port police to investigate themselves over racist and sexually explicit e-mails. That report said there "was a lack of adequate oversight by senior members of the Port’s executive staff," including the chief administrative officer (that was Okamoto).
"By letting police conduct their own investigation," wrote the Seattle P.I.'s Kristen Millares Bolt in May 2007, "the port's executives turned over the query to a department that would in the process violate port policy and past practice by cutting the port's labor relations and human resources staff out of discussions and disciplinary decisions, according to the review."
At the time, one of those executives, deputy chief Linda Strout, apologized on behalf of herself and other executives, including Okamoto, according to the P.I., "saying that as a group 'we did not acceptably discharge our executive responsibilities.'"
It's tough to imagine that someone in such a high position at the port wasn't aware of more of the other wrongdoings discovered within the organization, too, but poor oversight is the only place where Okamoto was directly implicated.
Okamoto didn't return my calls or e-mails about this last week, but I asked him again after Friday's meeting and this is what he had to say:
I had reported to the CEO wrongdoings in the police department as we knew it from labor relations and HR. I relied on the CEO to enforce practices. When it came down to it in the investigation, he denied that he had knowledge of those incidences. My mistake was that I did not document in writing the reports that I was giving him, so the investigation said it was a failure on the part of his executive staff in reporting it. I did not believe that was true.
(Okamoto also acknowledged the contractor fraud when asked by Sawant about his time at the port. He called that "an area where I found myself in conflict with the culture in the Port of Seattle, where they believed they were like a private sector organization absent from the transparency and accountability of public sector organizations.")
WHO ANSWERED SAWANT'S 10 QUESTIONS?
Sawant got just four responses to her candidate questionnaire. (Here they are: Alec Stephens, Moseley, Lee, and Sheley Secrest.)
Some highlights from their answers:
Two of the four, Lee and Secrest, support rent control, while the other two expressed skepticism about the likelihood that the state will lift its ban on the practice anytime soon, encouraging the council to focus on more immediate‚ but unspecified, policy changes.
Lee was the only one who expressed skepticism about the tunnel, saying, "The image of Bertha is a giant money pit! Seattle residents should not be stuck with the bill and cost overruns." Moseley supports the project and Stephens said there's no use rearguing its merits. Secrest said she sees the project as "an opportunity to increase government contracting with minority business owners."
The same split showed up on Sawant's question about the controversial tip credit included in the city's minimum wage ordinance last year. (Tip credits allow employers to pay tipped workers a lower minimum wage; Seattle's will be phased out by 2025.) Stephens said there was no use rehashing an old argument and Moseley said he supports the law as it was passed. Secrest and Lee said they oppose the tip credit (also know as the tip penalty).
WHAT DID THE PUBLIC HAVE TO SAY?
A full council chambers had drained to less than half by the time public comment came around.
Most of the finalists had at least a friend or two there to talk about how perfect they were for the job. For Lee, that included representatives from the homeless encampments Tent City 3 and Nickelsville, who called her "a woman that gets things done."
For a few moments early in the comment period we got a little bit of a Socialist Alternative/Sawant-supporter takeover—and a window into what today's full council meeting might feel like if they rally around a certain contender (like Lee) or against whomever they expect the council to choose (like Okamoto).
Sawant's campaign manager Philip Locker, who also works for Socialist Alternative and 15 Now, shouted that the whole thing had been a "snooze fest" that "put people to sleep," which "furthers the interest of the status quo."
"While you pretend that it is just a purely non-political, technical question of expertise," Locker said, "there is some political content to the sort of boring way you've organized this, which is to try to obscure that you are making a political decision... The person you appoint will make political decisions."
This post has been updated.
