You’ll have thought that the members of the brand new Seattle Metropolis Council had single-handedly orchestrated the collapse of the Soviet Union given the way in which they gushed about how their elections, an enormous political win for Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Sara Nelson, marked a return to greatness for a metropolis held captive by progressives for the final 4 years.
Through the swearing-in ceremony in January and through their campaigns, council members implied that the final council’s comparatively left-wing ideology made them extra susceptible to bickering, pouting, and normal childishness, which kneecapped their productiveness in workplace. However on the swearing-in ceremony, Nelson stated “there’s trigger for optimism,” regardless of the council’s greeness. “Right now, we usher in a brand new period of pragmatism and outcomes at Metropolis Corridor,” she proclaimed.
So when’s that new period really going to start out?
Since taking workplace seven months in the past, the Seattle Metropolis Council has handed little laws, and virtually none that sprung from their very own creativeness slightly than the mayor’s workplace.
Twitter complainers and podcasters have levied criticisms that this new council often is the “Do Nothing” council, however their slowness does not appear to trouble the enterprise curiosity that poured a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} into their latest campaigns. And possibly progressive critics should not lose sleep over the present dynamic, both. Regardless of her flexes of energy within the first few months of the yr, the mayor and Nelson have up to now declined to make use of their new political energy to advance something main.
As of July 8, the Seattle Metropolis Council has handed Public Security Chair Bob Kettle’s invoice that goals to speed up police hiring, considerably of a idiot’s errand amid a nationwide recruitment scarcity. In any other case, the council handed labor contracts the mayor’s crew already negotiated, the mayor’s emergency laws to permit for faster demolition of vacant buildings, the mayor’s surveillance plan, together with a number of housekeeping payments.
By way of uncooked numbers, the 2020 metropolis council handed 12 extra ordinances of their first six months than the 2024 metropolis council. Moreover, the 2020 council didn’t have a very long time on their coaching wheels earlier than they needed to react to the COVID-19 public well being disaster and the racial reckoning introduced on by the homicide of George Floyd. By this time in 2020, the earlier council had overturned racist, classist anti-loitering legal guidelines and barred cops from protecting their badges. They made fast work of quickly growing employee protections, small enterprise assist, and tenant rights in response to the COVID-19 emergency. Additionally they handed marketing campaign finance reforms, first-in-the-nation eviction protections, and the JumpStart payroll tax, which has saved the Metropolis from monetary wreck in each price range negotiation since its unanimous passage.
Council President Sara Nelson didn’t reply to my request for remark about why her council has taken so lengthy to search out its footing.
However Nelson had anticipated a steep studying curve in her remarks on the council’s swearing-in. The 2020 metropolis council boasted 20 years of expertise between its 9 members, not together with time that a lot of them spent working in council workplaces. In contrast, the brand new council has 10 years of expertise in workplace and elected Nelson, who’d served simply two years in workplace, to be their council president. With such little expertise, slightly than lawmaking, the brand new council spent a number of months listening to shows from central workers concerning the fundamentals of municipal governing.
One might argue that the council has much less energy to enact new coverage due to the quarter-billion-dollar price range deficit projected in 2025. They’ll’t really pay for brand spanking new packages as a result of the Metropolis can’t even pay for present ones. The council won’t talk about new income streams till the price range negotiations this fall, and the council doesn’t have a transparent pro-taxation majority. Nonetheless, the council can enact coverage adjustments—new tenant protections, zoning reforms, etcetera—for free of charge.
However not everybody shares this criticism. For a lot of council members, their true constituency is huge enterprise, actual property, and the opposite conservative forces that paid for his or her seats.
Certainly, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce appears glad with their return on funding within the council, purchased by kind of the identical enterprise and actual property pursuits that fashioned their now defunct PAC. In an e-mail to The Stranger, Chamber CEO Rachel Smith stated the council is “…engaged on precisely what the voters stated are their high priorities. It’s a lot tougher to unravel issues than to create them, and I see a robust dedication from all council members to discovering–and taking motion–on options.”
For Smith, the council’s successes embrace Kettle’s cop recruitment invoice, a invoice to increase the earlier council’s automated license plate reader pilot, Council Member Dan Strauss’s so-called audit, the latest transportation levy that the Metropolis needed to write this yr, and a few tweaks to the Mayor’s voter-approved housing levy that put extra rental help in landlord pockets.
Smith additionally signaled help of the council’s future actions, together with a invoice to incentivize builders to transform workplace buildings to housing (which was Mayor’s laws by the way in which, and such small-ball shit within the face of the housing disaster that it’s barely price mentioning), wayfinding enhancements (Mayor’s factor once more), and an upcoming invoice to crack down on road racing (Metropolis Legal professional’s invoice).
Given their constituency, nonetheless, it will not be the council’s objective to progress however slightly to preserve, and, in some instances, to backpedal.
Notably, the brand new council rendered two years of stakeholdering and policymaking ineffective by rejecting Council Member Tammy Morales’s Linked Communities invoice, which might have made it simpler for low-income communities to construct housing and group facilities.
Nelson picked a struggle with labor early on, letting firms dictate a repeal to the gig supply driver minimal wage ordinance handed by the earlier metropolis council. The invoice went by means of a number of rounds of committee conferences, confronted moral considerations, and has been delayed since June 18 when the council struck its ultimate vote from the agenda. On this case, the council’s seeming incompetence might have extended the lifetime of the minimal wage ordinance, which is a win for labor, Nelson’s political enemy.
Behind the scenes, curiosity teams are lobbying for different repeals, from renter rights to anti-loitering legal guidelines. These sorts of actions would take plenty of political will, and Nelson’s clumsy try and claw again labor rights has not demonstrated the council’s potential to coalesce round and enact blatantly corporatist and conservative coverage.
Whereas inaction lets present crises fester, prolonging the struggling of marginalized individuals in Seattle and hobbling alternatives for progress, maybe an incompetent council is just not a worst-case situation for many who reap the nominal advantages from the work of the earlier council. With this crew, doing little is best than doing something in any respect.
