However devout your atheism, for the sake of Seattle renters and what’s left of Mark Solomon’s hairline, pray that his city council colleagues actually do on Tuesday what they couldn’t manage at last week’s Housing and Human Services Committee (HHS) meeting: Show the hell up.

Last Wednesday, after an 18-month delay, members of the Seattle Renters Commission were scheduled to finally be appointed—and in some cases reappointed—to the city’s volunteer renters advisory board. Commissioners, supporters, and rental advocates filled council chambers anticipating an appointment vote, only for the process to collapse. Neither Council President Sara Nelson nor Councilmember Rob Saka attended, leaving the committee short of quorum. With former chair Cathy Moore having already resigned, the committee could afford to lose no more than two members.

“Look, people are volunteering their time. They’re not getting paid for this. We owe it to them to listen and make it happen,” Solomon, the committee’s vice chair, told The Stranger.

On paper, the Seattle Renters’ Commission exists to give renters a seat at the table of influence that too often forgets they’re there. It’s charged with advising the Mayor, City Council, and city departments on the policies that shape whether tenants merely scrape by, or live with a shred of stability in a city where north of $128,000 still has many hitting the Grocery Outlet every other week.

Nelson had informed Solomon the day before she’d be absent, without offering a public explanation. Saka, citing personal reasons, notified Solomon less than 30 minutes before the 9:30 a.m. start time that he couldn’t attend.

Solomon told The Stranger that he believed that the two had legitimate reasons for not showing up, but other council members weren’t as generous. “It’s hard for me to read this as anything other than intentional suppression of representation of renters who are at much higher risk of being displaced. The people in this city deserve people who will actually show up for them and do the work,” Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a member of Solomon’s committee and the only renter currently on the council, told The Stranger.

Rinck wasn’t alone in her exasperation. Backlash was swift from renters’ rights and anti-displacement advocates, who saw the absences as yet another attempt to stall a process neglected for nearly a year and a half under Moore’s leadership. During that time, ten of the commission’s fifteen seats went unfilled and nominees received no hearings, even as Moore attempted to advance legislation to roll back tenant protections.

“To fail to appoint commissioners in the last scheduled committee meeting before recess is to undermine not only that group’s ability to convene and meaningfully carry out its role: it is to contribute to the sense that ‘government’ has no interest in solving problems of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Alison Eisinger, Executive Director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, wrote in an email to Solomon, Saka, and Nelson after last week’s debacle.

Commission confirmations are now scheduled to take place at Tuesday’s full council meeting, along with other business that was delayed due to the absences, including appointments to the Disability Commission.

Eisinger had previously pressed Moore on the need to schedule confirmations, calling her refusal to do so a “counterproductive approach to engaging constituents in the work of understanding and addressing the issues and needs of more than 50% of Seattle residents who are renters.”

Solomon, who represents South Seattle on the council, says that’s why Tuesday’s meeting is all the more urgent: “That gives us a way forward to seat these folks … we owe it to them to listen and make it happen.”

In statements, both Nelson and Saka acknowledged the frustration caused by their absences. For Kate Rubin, a commissioner whose term expired in February and who is seeking reappointment on Tuesday, their excuses rang hollow.

“I absolutely believe it was deliberate,” Rubin says. “The email from former Councilmember Moore at 2:30 in the morning confirms it.”

The recently resigned Moore’s email directly urged Saka, Nelson, and Solomon to delay the vote, though she later told the Seattle Times that her email to Solomon bounced back.

“Beyond that, there’s just been a dismissive attitude toward the Renters Commission since this new council took office,” Rubin says.

For renters’ rights advocates, it’s difficult not to interpret last week’s absences, Moore’s witching-hour email lobbying, and her earlier pushes to rollback renter protections and to remake the Renters Commission to include landlords—a shift Rubin says would further muffle the voices of a rental population that now outnumbers homeowners—as anything but a ploy to run out the clock before Moore’s replacement, Debora Juarez, takes office risking further delays in seating the commission.

While the Renters Commission is technically advisory, it does weigh in on appointments to Seattle’s Social Housing Authority—the public developer tasked with building, owning, and maintaining permanently affordable mixed-income housing. The council’s conservative bloc has historically resisted Social Housing, pushing an alternative tax measure last year in opposition to it.

Rubin says that without the backlash, she doubts the council would have moved with such urgency,  fast‑tracking the confirmation for Tuesday instead of letting it languish.

Though she’s hopeful it will finally bring long-overdue confirmations, she’s clear that the work is barely beginning. Seattle’s average rent hit $2,110 last month—30 percent higher than the national average, leaving the city among the country’s priciest rental markets.

“Fully fund tenant services,” Rubin says. “The people supporting renters are underpaid, overworked, and burning out. Engage renters more in decisions that affect them, not just during 9-to-5 public comment. And create real accountability for landlords. Right now, code enforcement is complaint-based, and landlords can get away with violations just by stopping when they’re caught. Renters deserve a system that actually protects them.”

In short, even if all confirmations on the day go forward, it isn’t the finish line. It’s the bare minimum. And if the council can’t manage even that, what hope is there for a city where renters are already running out of money, patience, and most of all, time?