West Seattle, meet five of the people who want to represent you on the city council (plus one dropout). Kelly O
Yep, those are five city council candidates (and one drop out) posing politely in a bar like a group of college students who just met on a study abroad trip. I’ll get to that in a second.
First, can we talk about West Seattle?
This isolated corner of the city has always had a rebellious streak, threatening secession as recently as the mid-1990s. Now, the newly districted city council system is stoking the neighborhood's hyper-involved populist tendencies.
The newly created District 1 covers West Seattle, Delridge, and South Park, and has no incumbent council member running for reelection but nine newcomers. That's the most of any of the council races this year (though only one up on North Seattle’s District 5).
No one I asked could put a fine point on why this part of the city is so involved, but its strong identity was present long before district elections.
When West Seattle was its own city, it built the nation’s first municipally-run streetcar network, a one-mile stretch along California Avenue. After apprehension about joining the City of Seattle, West Seattle eventually came around and voted for annexation (325 in favor, 8 opposed) in 1907. Just a few months earlier, South Park had done the same.
West Seattle has threatened secession at least twice, and was home to populist hero city council member Charlie Chong. The district is also home to the Duwamish Longhouse, where tribal leaders last week held an event to promise an ongoing fight for federal recognition, which they were recently denied. (The reasons why are totally fucked.) Meanwhile, Delridge is a food desert and South Park (like Georgetown across the river) has some of the most polluted air in the region.
District 1 is dominated by homeowners. Its homeowner-to-renter ratio (60 to 40 percent) is the inverse of places like District 3, which includes Capitol Hill and the Central District, and District 7, which covers downtown.
Though it's part of deep blue (or, uh, whatever the color is for socialism) Seattle, lately West Seattle has shown higher levels of support for Republicans and opposition to taxes, according to political consultant Ben Anderstone, who mapped this all out on Crosscut last year.
Some residents have lived here for generations and they’re protective of its character, affordability, and parking. (There is still some free parking in West Seattle. What?!)
The current council member who lives in the district, though he was elected citywide, is Tom Rasmussen. He's known for his fierce protection of neighborhoods and, on his way into retirement, is pushing a plan that would give neighborhood residents power to set design and building requirements to “preserve neighborhood character." He’s not finding much support on the council for that idea.
Even if you’ve been paying attention to this race—maybe you’ve been to one of their 40,000 candidate forums—the candidates' often similar positions can bleed together into what feels like one loud voice calling from the ether saying something about how they really want light rail. I'm going to try to help split that etherial wail into nine (or so) distinct wails. Here we go!
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In that photo at the top of this post, the guy on the left is Philip Tavel, a lawyer and former candidate for a King County District Court judgeship who is running for District 1. Every Thursday, he runs a trivia night at Talarico's. The best part: He writes the questions himself.
On the night I stop by, he’s invited all of his competition to band together as a single team and donate their winnings (along with his pay for the night) to charity. The four candidates who show—Brianna Thomas, Shannon Braddock, Chas Redmond, and Karl Wirsing—plus dropout Tim Koch huddle around a table with beers and just as much forced congeniality as you’d expect.
Redmond gets shushed by his teammates for shouting out answers. The team is way off on its answer to the question about what year The Stranger was founded, but they nail one about the lyrics to Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Their team name is “The Primary is August 4.” They do not win.
While we wait to hear the scores from the first round, Brianna Thomas, one of a cohort of young candidates the new district elections system has drawn, tells me about some of the obscenely lengthy endorsement questionnaires she’s been answering for organizations lately. Thomas is an energetic, transit-dependent renter who is running on a promise to better represent neighborhoods like Delridge and South Park, especially on housing and transit. She’s lagging in fundraising with only about half the money the two frontrunners have raised and is sometimes unprepared on policy questions. Still, she's determined.
People often tell her it’s great she’s “running for the experience,” dismissing her as too young or inexperienced to win.
“Running for office is a lot like having your teeth pulled while people insist that you smile,” she says. “I am not running 'for experience.’”
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Though five candidates (plus one drop-out) have shown up to this trivia game, that’s not even all of them. Hell, it’s not even all the serious ones.
Having so many candidates in one race means they’ll all end up cutting into each other’s voter base, making it hard to really predict which two will make it through the August 4 primary. But conventional wisdom tells us that the two most likely to make it through may not really be newcomers at all. Lisa Herbold, a longtime aide to city council member Nick Licata, and Shannon Braddock, chief of staff to county council member Joe McDermott, are believed to be the current frontrunners.
Where some candidates in other districts have already raised more than $100,000, this incumbent-less race is cheaper. Braddock is leading in fundraising with about $59,600 and Herbold has raised about $55,500.
“People really want a narrative” of conservative versus liberal, Braddock says over eggs and hash browns at the Chelan Cafe, a no-frills diner in the shadow of the West Seattle bridge a few days after trivia. “All of my time and money has gone to progressive causes,” she says.
Along with her work in McDermott’s office, Braddock has worked as the legislative representative for her kids' elementary school PTA and on the boards of WestSide Baby and the West Seattle Food Bank.
A core of her campaign is transportation and transit, though most of her talking points on that issue revolve around the city working better with that state and county. She’s promising to reduce congestion on the bridge by creating bus-only lanes, expand service on the 120 bus route, and get funding for more sidewalks in the district.
On housing affordability, she opposes asking the state legislature to lift the ban on rent control, which Herbold supports. Braddock says she favors impact fees, which charge developers for road, park, and school improvements, and expanding the city’s multi-family tax exemption program, which offers a tax break for property owners who want to make improvements to their building if they set aside some building units as affordable housing. She’s noncommittal on linkage fees (again, in contrast to Herbold).
Braddock has a powerhouse of county supporters, including County Executive Dow Constantine. (A native son of West Seattle.) She’s also been endorsed by Rasmussen, restaurant and real estate groups, and the Chamber of Commerce’s political arm. She knows policy well (since, you know, she works on policy for a living) but she’s less wonky on the campaign trail than Herbold.
Braddock calls herself “decisive” in contrast to “the Seattle way,” which she says is sometimes used “as an excuse to not do the jobs that electeds are supposed to do.” Still, she’s also promising collaboration.
“To me,” she says, “good governance is not necessarily setting up a good guy and a bad guy.”
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For those wanting a narrative in which Herbold is the foil to Braddock, and the candidate taking bold positions that do create “a good guy and a bad guy”: prepare to be disappointed.
Herbold is a strong progressive who has worked with the Tenants Union of Washington State, the Low Income Housing Institute, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and ACORN. Her boss, Council Member Nick Licata, is a frequent left-leaning ally of Kshama Sawant on the council. But Herbold is deliberately de-Sawanting her message.
The day we meet for a walk through West Seattle, she says she just came from finalizing her mailers and striking language that felt too us-versus-them. “I was like, this is too Sawant,” she says, laughing. “I am not going to have my fist in the air. That is not my style.”
Herbold continued: “To me, it’s about making sure everybody has a seat at the table. It means making sure that our policies are grounded in fairness and awareness of their impacts on the people who have the least in the city. And it’s about having a conversation with yes, OK, the powerful about what our common values are and what kind of city we want to be.”
She points to paid sick and safe leave and minimum wage as times when the council listened to business interests to hear their concerns and still took action those interests didn’t necessarily support, because it was in the best interest of workers.
Herbold’s campaign is focused on housing affordability, including preservation of existing affordable housing with money from the housing levy, imposing linkage fees on developers, and creating inclusionary zoning to require developers to set aside certain amounts of affordable units or pay a fee. (Though linkage fees appear to be off the table for now after yesterday's "grand bargain" on housing policy.)
We walk to Linda Manor, where tenants got 100-percent-plus rent increases late last year, then to a squat gray apartment building where tenants are being evicted for a new microhousing development. The developer here is suing the city to try to avoid paying $11,000 in relocation assistance to displaced tenants.
This type of displacement connects directly to the sort of work Herbold has done recently in Licata's office, including a package of renter protection bills that would give tenants more notice when they’re facing “no-fault” evictions and strengthen the law requiring landlords to pay certain tenants relocation assistance.
"What drives me is a sense of what's just and what's right," Herbold says. "And that might mean not always coming out on the winning side of debates, and that's OK. I want to be a voice for folks who aren't used to having an ear at City Hall. I think sometimes that's more important than winning—making people feel represented."
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And with that... We're still not done! Who else is running? Well, with apologies to the lovely people of West Seattle, I can't spend my entire life on this one race so I'm gonna have to blast through the rest of the candidates in a kind of speed-District Date. Ready? Here goes:
Chad Redmond, a well-known West Seattle neighborhood activist who has worked on parks, trails, and festival projects in the district. His platform includes integrating neighborhood and transportation plans, providing "financial advice and counseling" for small businesses about sick leave and minimum wage, and more traffic enforcement.
Karl Wirsing, a former journalist who moved to the city in 2012 and is now director of communications for the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Much of his platform is focused on balancing growth with environmental sustainability.
Jody Rushmer, a "project manager at a local software company" who's promising to fix "poorly maintained roads and underfunded schools," though it's not clear how.
Arturo Robles, who once interned at the city, doesn't appear to have a campaign website, and whose campaign committee (which has raised $0) is called "Democrats/Progressives/Independents For the 99%ers in District One to Elect A. Robles."
Pavel Goberman, who, uh, well, here you go.
Farewell, West Seattle! It's been real, but now I gotta go back to the mainland. See you—maybe—on election night!
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