Tammy Morales Resigns from City Council, Calls For Culture Change As New Progressive Swears In

Council Member Tammy Morales has resigned from her position, citing a laundry list of incidents in which her colleagues eroded the City’s checks and balances and undermined her work as a lawmaker. She will leave the position January 6.

The 11 months she spent with the new conservative majority caused her “mental and physical well-being to deteriorate,” she said in a statement this morning. In an interview with The Stranger last week, before she shared her decision to step down, Morales said the Seattle City Council has created a “hostile,” “toxic work environment” and with a new, political minority member joining the body, it’s time they face it—if not for their colleagues than for their constituents.

On Tuesday, City Council hosted the ceremonial swearing in of Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a progressive who won her 2024 election with 205,000 votes. That’s 66,000 more votes than the other Citywide member, Council President Sara Nelson, received in 2021 and 50,000 more votes than Mayor Bruce Harrell, making her the most popular elected official in the majority conservative City Hall. 

Her office “will be the people’s office,” Rinck said to applause from council chambers. “To every young person, every working parent, every community leader, every neighbor who questions if Seattle still has a place for them: I see you, I hear you, I am here for you, and this office belongs to you.”

But it’s unclear if her popularity with voters will translate to the dais. Rinck ran as a clear referendum on the council’s conservative majority and only earned the endorsement of Morales, who has been the target of scolding, undue scrutiny, and other bullying tactics as the body’s lone progressive. 

And Morales says the problem is bigger than her. City Hall in general needs a culture change and quick, Morales says. Rinck doesn’t deserve to be treated how the council has treated Morales and further her constituents, outnumbering that of any other elected official, do not deserve the agenda they so overwhelmingly voted for kneecapped by the conservative clique. Morales says she, the bureaucrats, and the policy wonks in the cross-hairs will be fine. But ultimately, the hostility hurts the constituents who benefit from progressive policy—renters, workers, and communities of color—most of all. 

One Versus Eight

“It’s been rough,” Morales told The Stranger last week with a sad laugh. 

It all started when the council appointed Tanya Woo, an exceptionally dim candidate that the newbies grew fond of during the 2023 campaign. Woo challenged Morales for the District two seat, lost, and her newly elected friends handed her a job on the council anyway. Not only did the move reek of interference from the council’s corporate donors and disregard for the will of the voters, it also seemed to communicate an unwillingness to accept their colleague Morales.

It seems the council still has some unresolved feelings about the apparent unpopularity of Woo. Woo ran again this year to retain her appointment to the vacant Citywide position, but lost again, this time to Rinck. Despite her poor showing against Rinck in November, Council Member Rob Saka insisted the two-time loser had “earned” a spot on the dais and would “always” be a city council member to him. 

But the grudge against Morales appeared to be deeper than a show of loyalty to Woo. The new council seemed to and at times would explicitly associate Morales with the perceived failings of the previous progressive council, making all her moves suspect.

The public first saw the council’s open contempt for Morales over her Connected Communities bill, a simple developer incentive package that would support more community-driven affordable housing at no cost to the City.

At a council briefing in April, Council Member Cathy Moore scolded Morales for more than a full minute, falsely accusing her of vilifying her and other council members in the media over their decision to vote against the developer incentive package. While Moore and the dissenting members probably deserved to get pegged as “corporate shills” and “evil” for their vote, Morales did not vilify her colleagues in any publication. 

Instead, Morales claims, the council majority more often “impugnes” her than the other way around. “For all the talk of civility and respecting one another’s differences, every time I have expressed a difference of opinion, I’ve been attacked from the dais.”

“My colleagues have called me lazy, they’ve called me a poor leader, they’ve called me performative,” says Morales. “I’ve been accused of misinforming the public, I’ve been accused of impugning the motives of my colleagues just because I raised a question.” 

Obviously, a public reprimand from her peer can’t feel great, but Morales said she was more upset that her colleagues tanked her developer incentive bill. She and stakeholders had worked on the package for almost two years, drumming up strong community support for a well-informed bill. And her new colleagues all advocated vaguely to “cut red tape” for developers to build more affordable housing without costing the City or displacing vulnerable communities. Morales’ bill checked all those boxes, but it seems to her they rejected it because it had her name on it. 

More recently, the council incessantly nitpicked the budget amendments attached to her name. As Real Change reporter Guy Oron tweeted, council members proposed 178 amendments to the budget and only rejected 10. Morales sponsored eight of those. To look at it another way, the council approved 96% of the amendments proposed by other council members and only 56% of Morales’ amendments, according to Oron.

No other City Council Member agreed to an interview about the culture on the dais, but Council Member Dan Strauss seemed to acknowledge the bullying in a meeting last month. 

Ahead of the final vote on the 2025-2026 budget, Morales announced, on the verge of tears, that she would vote “no” on the budget for the first time in her five years on the council because she believed it would cause harm to the marginalized communities she represents. Strauss disagreed with her characterization, even repeating the council’s routine insinuation that Morales misrepresented facts, but Strauss’s high-spirited, grin-and-bear-it attitude broke for a moment. 

He apologized, seemingly on behalf of his colleagues for “target[ing]” Morales’s amendments and said, “I wish this council had taken care of you better to feel like you can support this budget.”

For possibly the first time, an elected official validated what the media, the public, and Morales had seen for months: The new, conservative majority treated the lone progressive poorly. 

As much as she hates to admit it, her colleagues’ attitude toward her ideas has stifled Morales’ legislative imagination. Morales planned to propose a ban on sweeps in extreme weather some time this year, but after she saw how roundly the council rejected her incentives package, she decided to “put it on the backburner.”

More Than Morales 

While Morales may be the most public target, the council has on several occasions stamped out real or perceived progressive dissent.

In one of her first actions as Council President, Nelson fired head of central staff Esther Handy, who boasts a progressive policy background, and replaced her with fiscal conservative Ben Noble. Moore scrubbed criticism of her archaic prostitution loitering bill from central staff’s independent bill analysis. Nelson sicced cops on her political enemies for protesting the City’s inadequate support for refugee families in council chambers.

Morales has noticed this attitude permeating throughout the City government. For example, City Attorney Ann Davison appears to be targeting progressive Judge Pooja Vaddadi by removing the democratically elected judge from more than 150 cases. Morales also noted many high profile departures and shakeups under this Mayor’s leadership—Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell, Budget Director Julie Dingley, and Office of Police Accountability Director Gino Betts Jr.. The Mayor’s spokesperson, Jamie Housen clarified that Dingley and Betts did not work in the Mayor’s Office.

“While each person’s individual decision to seek a new opportunity is different, it’s well understood that these kinds of high stress, high pressure jobs, especially in executive department offices, are demanding and often have increased levels of turnover,” says Housen. “Mayor Harrell specifically designed his office to encourage thoughtful conversation, productive debate, and a wide range of opinions.”

The City Attorney’s office declined to comment.

Morales says she’s not sure how to fix the “toxic environment” at City Hall or specifically within the council. “No one thinks this is a problem except for me,” she says. 

“There’s still a lot of work to do,” says Morales. “But this is a hard place to be right now, so I do think it’s important to daylight what’s happening. With Rinck coming in, it’s not fair for her to get treated the same way that I’ve been treated.”

Playing Nice

For Rinck’s part, she’s already extending olive branches to her colleagues. During her campaign, she prided herself on working well with others—to note her favorite example, she managed to convince the suburbs to pay into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. 

In Rinck’s remarks at her ceremonial swearing in yesterday, she gave an individual shoutout to each of her new colleagues, detailing what they could work on together, specific to their own committees. For example, she told Council Member Joy Hollingsworth, Chair of the Parks, Public Utilities & Technology Committee, that she looked forward to working with her to protect and grow green spaces. Rinck told Council Member Bob Kettle, the Chair of the Public Safety Committee, that she looked forward to building up alternative response teams with him. 

In a press release announcing Rinck’s swearing in, Nelson said, “I am excited to welcome our newest member, who is ready to hit the ground running. [Rinck] joins us at a pivotal time, as we continue to seek common-sense solutions and shared ground to best serve all of Seattle’s residents.”

But otherwise, the council made no public fanfare at Rinck’s Tuesday ceremony. Immediately following Rinck’ remarks, Saka gave a quick “welcome” and acknowledged her first day drew out the larger than usual crowd, but then launched into a minutes-long rant about the strength of the Finnish people before introducing a proclamation to honor the life of West Seattle Blog co-founder Patrick Sand. By contrast, the council sang Woo’s praises when they appointed her to the position earlier this year and then spoke at length to bid her gushing farewells last month even after hours of budget negotiations.

It shouldn’t come as a shock that Rinck made a public commitment to working with others and her colleagues did not reciprocate at the ceremony. Morales also made a point to promise to play nice with others when they all swore in earlier this year and that didn’t save her from her fate. But Morales concedes Rinck may benefit from not being associated with the previous council—despite conservative efforts to draw the connection during the campaign. Morales says her association specifically with former Council Member Kshama Sawant, a firebrand socialist who managed to permanently rewire the brains of Nextdoor users across the region, seems particularly distasteful to the new council. 

The previous, nominally more progressive council also didn’t like Sawant. The public and her colleagues certainly accused her of being performative or uncivilized or any number of things Morales hears about herself today. The difference is that Sawant had always been clear that she didn’t want a collegial relationship with the rest of the council. She didn’t see council chambers as her workplace, she saw it as a war zone. 

Moving forward, Rinck has a few options. She could play nice, as Morales had, and attempt to persuade the more middle-of-the-pack council members on select issues. Or she could make like Sawant and steel herself from the bully tactics of her colleagues, fill City Hall with an energetic coalition, and pressure the council to cave to their agenda. But still, Morales’s departure puts progressive constituents back where they were before Rinck’s hope-inspiring victory last month—a progressive caucus of one.