One thing Cathy Moore accomplished in her brief 18-month tenure of Seattle City Council was blocking Seattle Renters Commission appointments as housing committee chair — the 15-member committee dwindled down to just five commissioners. With Moore departed, City Council’s housing committee was set to restore the renters commission by approving 11 appointments to the Seattle Renters Commission on Wednesday, but there was just one problem: two councilmembers did not show up, preventing quorum to call the votes.
Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmember Rob Saka (District 1) declined to attend the meeting, staying in their offices, apparently. Acting Chair Mark Solomon appeared confounded by the move, and called a half-hour recess hoping in vain that his colleagues would materialize. Solomon is an interim appointed councilmember temporarily filling in as housing chair due to Moore’s resignation earlier this month.
The Seattle Renters Commission, tasked with being the official voice of tenants advising City government, has been shorthanded for 18 months, with only five of its 15 seats filled. Council had been set to refill the ranks with the 11 appointments and three reappointments on the docket, and many of the nominees took off work to be able to attend the meeting.
Neither Nelson or Saka has fully explained their reason for their boycotting the meeting. The Urbanist has reached out to their offices, but has yet to hear back. It does appear that Nelson objected to the commission appointments and tried to strongarm the chair ahead of time.
“I wasn’t going to be here, so they already knew,” Nelson told PubliCola’s Erica Barnett.
Barnett also reported that Nelson asked Solomon to remove the commission appointments from the agenda at the behest of Moore: “The previous day, Council President Sara Nelson, who reportedly got an email from Moore asking her not to allow the appointments to move forward earlier in the week, had reportedly asked Solomon to remove the appointments from the committee agenda.”
Update: On Thursday afternoon, Nelson issued an apologetic statement, saying that the housing committee agenda items would be taken up by full council at its next meeting on Tuesday, July 29: “I want to acknowledge the frustration my excused absence contributed to the lack of quorum at yesterday’s HHS committee meeting and apologize to the people who took the time to show up for the committee vote on their appointment to a board or commission, including the Renters’ Commission. I am grateful for their willingness to serve our city, and delays in the appointment process serve no one well.”
Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who was the only committee member other than the chair to attend, sharply criticized the delay tactic.
“This is so disrespectful,” Rinck said. “It’s hard for me to read this as anything other than intentional suppression of representation. Key representation Seattle is a majority renter city. I am the only member of this body that is a renter. We are the majority, and renters are much likely to displaced and experience homelessness, and working people are being displaced from this city every day, as we fail to address the affordability crisis. We’ve been in a state of emergency on homelessness for years.”
Dionne Foster, who is challenging Nelson for her seat in the upcoming election, echoed Rinck’s sentiment, saying the council president was acting irresponsibly. (Full disclosure: The Urbanist Elections Committee, on which I serve, endorsed Foster.)
“As a City Councilmember, your job is to show up and do the work. Councilmember Sara Nelson’s refusal to attend today’s Housing Committee meeting — despite being scheduled to vote on long-overdue appointments to the Renters’ Commission — is an insult to the people she was elected to serve,” Foster said in a statement. “In a city where most residents are renters, ignoring that responsibility is unacceptable. And when community members take time off work to come to City Hall, failing to show up is not only disrespectful — it undermines public trust in our leaders. Seattle deserves better.”
The housing committee had also been set to approve five appointments (or reappointments) to the Seattle Housing Authority Board, one to the Seattle Social Housing Public Development Authority Governing Council, and one to the Seattle Disability Commission.
Stonewalling the renters commission appointments appears to have been part of Moore’s scheme to get landlord voices on the renters commission, effectively changing its charter. “Moore reportedly wanted to create a joint landlord-renter group of some kind,” PubliCola‘s Erica Barnett posted. Apparently, the idea had been to appoint seven landlords to the commission to counterbalance tenant voices — in practice, it may have deadlocked the group on many issues.
That may explain Moore’s delay tactic, along with Moore’s desire to reform eviction policy and repeal some of the tenant protections enacted by the previous council — a goal Nelson appeared to share. As constituted, the renters commission clearly would have objected to such a move. Although the renters commission lacks the power to block legislation, they could have raised a stink.
Barnett noted that most of the renters commission appointments were made by Mayor Bruce Harrell, but one of his nominees appears to be held up: “Allied Residential senior portfolio manager (landlord) Bruce Fischer, is not on the list of appointees anymore, but the agenda only included 14 (of 15) nominees.”
Risking federal grants with delay
The two committee members boycotting Wednesday’s meeting also delayed a vote on accepting $30.7 million in federal grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Much of this was housing awards. “Councilmembers were scheduled to vote on over $16 million in federal housing grants – jeopardizing essential HUD funding working families are relying on,” a Foster campaign spokesperson noted.
Rinck has led the charge to grapple with Trump Administration cuts and policy changes, chairing a new committee that was stood up earlier this year. She brought up the concern of losing yet more federal funding on Wednesday.
“We’re losing federal resources for housing and human services,” Rinck said. “I know we’re going to hear a presentation today on some of the federal resources coming in, but we can’t take action today. That was critical action that we needed. That is $30 million that we haven’t lost yet, that members of this body continue to state that they’re so concerned about losing federal funding. And now we’re the ones throwing this into some jeopardy.”
Ann Gorman, who is a senior policy adviser with the Seattle Human Services Department, told councilmembers that Seattle faces an August 16 deadline to approve the grant and file their paperwork. That approval no longer will be able to run through the housing committee, which isn’t scheduled to meet again until August 13, as normal. However, it appears councilmembers intend to vote to approve the grants directly in full council, skipping the committee step.
Renters feel slighted
Chair Solomon ended the committee meeting to convert it into a community meeting in order to still hear from the nominees in attendance and the City officials that were set to present without running afoul of council rules, which require quorum for official proceedings. The Seattle Channel continued to broadcast the meeting despite that change.
Seattle Renters Commission co-chair Kate Rubin was set to be reappointed at the meeting, and she expressed frustration at the delay.
“I am one of the interim co-chairs of the Seattle renters commission, one of five people who have been holding this commission down over the last 18 months,” Rubin said. “I’m also somebody who works with renters, and in my daily work at Be:Seattle we do renter education and organizing and empower renters to get more typically involved, because we are being systemically shut out of City Hall, which today feels like just such a perfect example of that — of how our voices really do not matter to those in power.”
Rinck agreed the maneuver connoted a sign of a disrespect.
“It is councilmembers’ chartered responsibility to be at these meetings,” Rinck said. “This is literally our job. So I find it deeply frustrating that people took time to leave their jobs in the middle of the day, yet not every member of this committee could show up to do theirs.”
Rubin argued the rest of council was undermining the District 2 councilmember, which she argued was a pattern after former D2 Councilmember Tammy Morales resigned in January, citing mistreatment by her colleagues.
“I live in District 2, and I’m a voter, and I’m actively engaged,” Rubin added. “And seeing my city councilmember yet again be disrespected and shut out of doing the work of a councilmember and not being able to move the things that their constituents value forward in a very intentional way… I’m sorry I’m feeling very angry.”
Carrying on the work at one-third strength was making the position particularly taxing for the few remaining commissioners, Rubin noted.
“I’m angry about all of this, because there’s so few of us,” Rubin said. “The renters commission has taken up way more of my time than any unpaid commission appointment ever should. But I do feel an obligation to Seattle renters to hold it down, I guess. And I was still looking forward to having a fully seated commission, where we could work together and try to move ideas forward, and really just get creative.”
Nominees noted that the commission needed broad representation across racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic barriers, and is currently without a Black member in its depleted state.
Echoing Rinck, Solomon apologized to the commissioners and nominees for have their appointment delayed at the last second.
“I apologize for you taking the time out of your day to come down here to be frustrated,” Solomon said. “And I want to echo that we need to do better. So I want to thank you being here. Thank you for willing to give up your time to do this work voluntarily. It says a lot about your character. You’re willing to give your time, your energy, your effort, to advocate for folks and not get paid for it. So thank you for that.”
Barring a committee assignment shakeup, Solomon will go back to being vice-chair once Moore’s replacement is appointed later this month. Early reports are that former D5 Councilmember Debora Juarez is the favorite for that appointment, and she would take over as housing committee chair, if appointed. Once the committee goes back to five members, it would take three rather two absences to block quorum.
This article was updated at 2:55pm Thursday with Nelson’s statement.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.