Earlier this year, before the August primary, the Seattle Times editorial board did its thing and endorsed a bunch of safe, mainstream, largely Chamber-backed candidates for city council. There was one district where they just couldn’t make up their minds, though: District 6, covering Ballard and Fremont in northwest Seattle.
Incumbent Mike O’Brien is running in that district and the Seattle Times editorial board really does not like Mike O’Brien. But the Times didn’t like his opponents either, saying all three of them “lack[ed] the breadth of knowledge about city government to be effective.”
Now, the board has changed its mind. Today, the Times endorsed Catherine Weatbrook, O’Brien’s neighborhoods-focused general election opponent.
Considering the regularly conservative positions the Times takes, this isn’t all that surprising, although it’s not clear what changed their mind on Weatbrook between the primary and now. Weatbrook has always been O’Brien’s most viable challenger, she’s always been focused on neighborhoods, and she’s always claimed to be more pragmatic than O’Brien. She told me this summer that “most people—that doesn’t mean 90 percent, [but] more than half—aren’t following the big picture: $15 an hour, Shell Oil, Trans-Pacific Partnership, you name it… They’re like, ‘That same pothole is still there. That curb is still broken.’”
The Times says she’s “become a much stronger candidate and is a clear contrast to O’Brien.”
But there’s still plenty of weird shade-throwing in this endorsement, starting with the Times‘ continuing obsession with the maritime industry.
O’Brien has solid attributes as a smart, hardworking councilmember. But he is governed by ideology even at the expense of his constituents — see his role as lead “kayaktivist” against the Shell Arctic oil rig that benefits the maritime workers he should be representing.
This echoes the board’s chastising of O’Brien in the primary election non-endorsement for “grandstanding” and “showmanship” as a kayaktivist, which—as Christopher has already explained—makes no sense.
Before the primary, the Times editorial board went further, saying that O’Brien wasn’t “pragmatic” enough to find good solutions on housing affordability, claiming:
…he veers into ideological responses, such as supersized fees on developers, and he doesn’t weigh the consequences of making housing more costly to build. That sounds like something radical Councilmember Kshama Sawant would support.
Now, they’ve chosen to ignore the fact that O’Brien is compromising—the very thing Sawant opponents claim she’s never willing to do—on that linkage fee. Since that earlier non-endorsement, O’Brien as agreed to the so-called “grand bargain” with developers, in which he and others have agreed to support imposing a linkage fee only on developers of commercial projects (not all building, as O’Brien originally proposed).
Here’s what they say in today’s endorsement of Weatbrook:
Voters should take the time to hear her nuanced analysis of the city’s current affordable-housing push. She rightly notes that the mayor’s plan proposes massive upzoning of urban villages, but City Hall has yet to vet it with neighborhoods, the same neighborhoods that played a major role in the creation of those same urban villages in the 1990s.
She is also right that the new proposals are not explicitly tied to transportation infrastructure improvements. Weatbrook wants to pay for those in part with developer impact fees, which O’Brien deprioritizes in favor of a questionably legal linkage fee to pay for affordable housing.
So, Weatbrook wants more neighborhood feedback on increasing density. She’s also said she wants more neighborhood feedback on siting a homeless encampment in Ballard, which she says the city did without getting enough input from neighbors. And the Times believes that’s a good idea.
But there are some things that the most strident “neighborhood” types are never going to be happy with. Tent encampments and increased density in or near precious single family zones are pretty high on that list. For those types of policies, repeated vetting with neighborhoods, as the Times calls for, just means stopping them from happening.
Mike O’Brien is, like all eight of his colleagues on the council, an imperfect progressive. He’s faced criticism from some die-hard urbanists for claiming to be an environmentalist while compromising on land use issues that could create more density. And even the Stranger Election Control Board thinks he’s too nice to be as effective as he could be in pushing this city left.
But the Times is ignoring some of O’Brien’s most important work of the last year here—not only compromising to make progress on housing affordability, but, hello! his unprecedented bill to let Uber and Lyft drivers unionize—in order to instead side with the outdated neighborhood movement.
