Sally Bagshaw failed to take us out on either her airplane or her sailboat this year, she’s a foe of district elections (worrying Seattle will now get stuck in “ward politics”), she’s impossible to pin down on how much developers should be paying in linkage fees to fund affordable housing, and she told us we need to “stay the course” (borrowing a phrase from George W. Bush) on the insane, irresponsible, money-sucking, never-ending morass that is the downtown tunnel project. So, basically, we would have been ready to put Bagshaw on a sailboat ride into retirement if her two lame-ass challengers didn’t make her look AWESOME. Deborah Zech Artis picked a video voters’ guide taping over her meeting with the SECB—total Godden move; she did the same thing to us—and Google engineer Gus Hartmann… good lord.
This guy showed up looking very tech now—chunky glasses, Fitbit-looking watch, clothes that probably cost more than the SECB’s collective wardrobe—and told us he was running because the new tech arrivals in this city act like their mere presence is such a civic good that the rest of Seattle should bow and scrape and thank them. We were with Hartmann until it turned out he had shown up to our meeting with zero—literally, zero—actual ideas for what should change in this city. In other words, he felt that his mere presence in this race was such a civic good that the SECB should bow and scrape and endorse him. In other words, he was exactly exemplifying the problem he supposedly launched his candidacy to combat. We were not pleased, and after a bit of a verbal thrashing, Hartmann admitted that showing up and wasting our time was “literally the least I could do.” You got that right, Gus.
Bagshaw, by way of contrast, came to life during a glorious pissing match with a misinformed SECB member who accused her of voting to block more homeless encampments. “You’re dead-ass wrong,” Bagshaw told him—and she was dead-ass right! Vote Bagshaw.
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