Columbia City resident and lawyer Rory O’Sullivan, who has spent his career fighting landlords, bankers, and the pesky bureaucrats standing between you and your unemployment benefits, announced his candidacy for Seattle City Attorney on Wednesday. O’Sullivan’s the first candidate to throw his hat in the ring for the position currently held by Republican City Attorney Ann Davison.
O’Sullivan’s worked in multiple legal aid firms in Seattle, including The Northwest Justice Project, Housing Justice Project, and he now runs his own law firm, Washington Employment Benefits Advocates, which helps people navigate unemployment insurance issues. In 2003, he founded Washington Public Campaigns, which became Fix Democracy First, an organization that helped overturn the state law preventing public funding for elections and paved the way for Seattle’s democracy voucher program. The common theme in O’Sullivan’s life seems to be evening the playing field between people who have everything and people who have nothing. He wants to bring that philosophy to the City Attorney’s Office.
He’s Coming for Ann Davison’s Job
O’Sullivan’s campaign stands as a direct challenge to Davison, who he believes has barreled the City down the wrong path. As City Attorney, O’Sullivan said he would present a new vision of what the office could be: Creating and increasing funding for evidence based criminal diversion programs, reducing how much money tax payers have to spend paying off civil settlements for the bad behavior of the Seattle Police Department, and standing up for City labor standards and tenants.
O’Sullivan argued that the duties of the City Attorney’s Office (CAO) extend far beyond the criminal legal system, and should weigh in on issues such as wage theft, eviction policies, and the Seattle Police union contract. And when it came to the criminal legal system, he would focus on making sure the City provided the services people needed to keep them from cycling through jail.
O’Sullivan says he’s found it “frustrating” to watch Davison execute programs such as the High Utilizer Initiative, which simply cycles people through the jails. Rather, O’Sullivan would reorient the program to focus on finding out what the people interacting with the criminal legal system needed, and connect them with services. He made clear that he dislikes how Davison has treated Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi—diverting all criminal cases away from her docket—and vowed to free her from her exile in infraction court. He also believes the City Attorney never should have ended community court; if elected, he would try to bring that back, while expanding other therapeutic court options.
He’s also positioned himself in opposition to some of the recent actions of the conservative city council. In particular, he called council’s Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) zone and Stay Out Area Prostitution (SOAP) zones a way of the City Attorney and City Council “making it look like they're doing something without actually improving public safety.” It’s no wonder he’s already earned the endorsement of City Council Member Tammy Morales.
A Housing Advocate
O’Sullivan bounced around as a child. Born in San Francisco, his family moved to England when he was about 6 years old, and he lived there for about two years before his family moved to Bellevue. (In an attempt to fit in, he said he worked to gain a British accent when he arrived in the UK, and just as quickly worked to drop it when he moved back to the US.) He attended the University of Washington for his undergraduate degree, and after college he went to work for Congressman Jim McDermott. He worked for McDermott through 9/11, as well as the Iraq War. (O’Sullivan can rightly say he was on the right side of history when it came to calling bullshit on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, since McDermott said it way back in 2002.)
O’Sullivan went on to work for The Northwest Justice Project (NJP). There, he helped set up the statewide response to the foreclosure crisis in Klem v. Washington Mutual Bank. In that case, he fought for the rights of an elderly woman on Whidbey Island who fell behind on her mortgage payments and had her house sold out from under her—despite having a buyer that might have made her whole with some profit. O’Sullivan and the NJP took the case all the way to the Washington Supreme Court and managed to secure a landmark decision that helps hold trustees in charge of foreclosed housing more accountable, O’Sullivan says.
After that, O’Sullivan moved on to the Housing Justice Project, a nonprofit that provides free legal assistance to renters facing eviction in King County. At the time, Washington had no right-to-counsel law, so most of their attorneys worked as volunteers. O’Sullivan shared one in particular that left a lasting impression on him. It happened one Christmas Eve. His job entailed finding people who could step in and show up for court in eviction cases, and he saw one scheduled for the holiday. He hesitated to ask one of his attorneys to show up, so he called the landlord’s attorney to see if they could postpone the hearing. The attorney said no. So, O’Sullivan showed up for court. He talked to the client, but quickly realized the man had some sort of cognitive disability. The man lived with his mom, but she was in the hospital. So again, O’Sullivan proposed postponing the hearing, arguing that this case seemed complicated and he wanted some time to untangle it. Again, the landlord’s attorney said no.
Luckily, the judge caught on pretty quickly that the guy facing eviction couldn’t advocate for himself, he assigned a guardian ad litem to the case, and postponed the hearing. But it illustrated for O’Sullivan how easily people can fall through the cracks of our system. He keeps that case in mind when he sees the current City Council considering cuts to tenant assistance and eviction moratoriums. He’s seen the role Davison has taken to shape policy for the City, and if he became City Attorney, he'd want to work hard to advocate for tenant protections and funding for the organizations who advocate for people struggling to maintain housing.
A Champion of the Unemployed
O’Sullivan started his own practice, Washington Employment Benefits Advocates, which helps to ensure that people entitled to employment benefits receive those funds from the government. His work touches all parts of the legal system, including the jails. He recently had a client housed at the South Correctional Entity (SCORE) in Des Moines and mentioned how he’s struggled to ensure his client could make their employment benefit hearings by telephone. He called the jail a poorly run facility, and he disagreed with the City’s decision to contract with them.
His work continues to inform his perspective on how easy it is to find yourself homeless or dealing with addiction issues. One of his recent clients, a woman diagnosed with ADHD, lost the doctor who prescribed her Adderall. The woman used Apple Care and had limited options for a new doctor. The one she ended up seeing refused to fill her Adderall prescription. So, she turned to methamphetamine, O’Sullivan says.
The woman knew her habit wasn’t sustainable. She came clean with her employer and went on leave to try to access treatment. The first place she tried wouldn’t accept her referral because the person who sent her actually did not have the power to refer her there. The next place that accepted her turned out to be a treatment facility for men. By the time she managed to find a facility, her leave from work had run out and she was still using drugs. They gave her a drug test, she failed, and the company fired her for cause and just like that, she could not even access unemployment benefits. That’s how people end up homeless, O’Sullivan says.
People such as his client don’t need 45 days in jail only to come out and struggle to rebuild their lives, he argued. They need real services, without a ton of strings attached, to make sure they can actually escape the criminal legal system and ultimately succeed.
O’Sullivan dreams of running a City Attorney’s office that helps more than it hurts and offers a helping hand to the most underserved people in the City.
