ANALYSIS | A Short History of Seattle City Council District 8 Candidate Alexis Mercedes Rinck

The special election to fill the District 8 Seattle City Council seat involves two people, but in many ways, it is not about those people. Or, at least, it hasn’t been.

Rather, it’s about ideology. Councilmember Tanya Woo, the current holder of the seat, is there by the grace of the conservative majority that came to power in last year’s elections. After losing her race in District 2 that year against incumbent Tammy Morales, her more successful compatriots saw fit to appoint her to council anyway. On Jan. 23, they voted to give her the District 8 seat, starting her just-about-year-long term and triggering the special election we’re about to vote in. Besides the general feeling that appointing her was a bit of an end-run around the will of the people, her right-leaning ideas about public safety, crime, and homelessness have ruffled a lot of feathers within the city’s flock of progressives. So much so that three viable left-leaning candidates came out against her for the Aug. 6 primary.

As we wrote then, if you wanted a more progressive person in office, any of the three would do. “Choose your fighter,” we urged, and you did, in the form of Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a former King County Regional Homelessness Authority staffer. In the primary, she not only beat out her fellow progressives, but in fact took home the overall majority of votes, with 50.18%. That’s 99,394 votes to Woo’s 76,008. When you add in the 16,142 votes that went to Rinck’s fellow progressives, that’s just shy of 40,000 votes for Woo to go find for Nov. 5.

As Woo herself put it, in an interview with the South Seattle Emerald at the Panama Hotel, “We're expecting 80 [percent turnout] in the general. So there's half as many votes out there and a lot of uninformed voters in this election. We don't know which way it's going to go.”

Whichever way it goes, will be, to some extent, a referendum on whether Seattleites are happy with the conservative council majority they elected only a year ago, or whether they want to see the pendulum swing back towards the left a bit.

That said, it’s still a race between two people.

One of them, Woo, has been the subject of a lot of scrutiny. Since rising to prominence on the back of her community activism on behalf of the Chinatown-International District, including nighttime patrols to protect seniors and stop graffiti, as well as a campaign demanding more community outreach in advance of the siting of a large homeless shelter in the area, Woo has drawn a lot of ire from the city’s left. The list of grievances is too long to print here, but the highlight reel is that she’s a landlord, that her only solution for public safety is paying cops whatever they want, and that she is completely beholden to the corporate interests that quietly run our city.

Be that as it may, it’s not like she’s Cruella DeVil. This journalist first encountered her hauling a folding table from her beat-up Honda Civic down to Kau Kau BBQ Restaurant, the CID mainstay that her father-in-law owns. And she’s done plenty of stints in the various restaurants her own family has owned. Either way, whether you know and love her or know and hate her, it’s safe to say she’s well-known.

Rinck, by contrast, is a relative unknown, having never run for office before this year’s primary. Given that she is on track to earn a seat on council, we wanted to know more about who she is and how her policies would differ from Woo’s. So we got coffee with her.

Rinck came to Seattle by way of Pacifica, California, famous for its deluxe, beachfront Taco Bell. A self-described youth activist, she moved here because of a shift in thinking. Instead of tearing down the system, she decided, she would try to change it from the inside. To start her journey, she applied to the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs. While studying there, she lived in several apartments between the University District and Ravenna, and waited tables at Agave Cocina & Tequila in Lower Queen Anne.

After her initial stint in North Seattle, she moved to east Capitol Hill for awhile, but has finally landed in the Central District.

“Of course, [I] fell in love with Seattle,” she says, “because what’s not to love?”

Alerted that that is exactly what every person who has ever run for city council says about the city, she added some specifics: “I fell in love with how green the city is. I love the weather. It works for me. I love rainy days.”

The light rail also helped, says Rinck, who has lived that sweet, sweet, sometimes extremely frustrating car-free lifestyle since she moved here.

“I remember moving here and learning about the light rail project, seeing stations that were coming online. I just really saw it as a city that was growing and changing and benefiting, innovating, doing some interesting things.”

Once out of school, she went right to work in policy. In her career, she’s done the opposite of her apartment hunting, which is to say she’s started south and moved north. First, she worked as an intern for the city of Lakewood, where she endured a three-bus commute to do her part for their Parks and Recreation program. Besides living her version of the eponymous television show, she says, she helped organize free concerts and got to write her first human services grants.

Later, she worked for former Burien City Councilmember Krystal Marx, as an aide, before landing a job as a policy analyst for the Sound Cities Association. There, she says, she had to learn literally everything about local government, because she had to brief not just one politician on it, but every elected official on whichever committee she was assigned to support in a given year.

“I was staffing for 40 different elected officials at once on 12 regional boards and committees,” she says. “ I staffed for the Children and Youth Advisory Board, the Board of Health Regional Policy Committee, the Affordable Housing Committee, the Joint Recommendations Committee — which is super wonky and nobody knows about, but it actually oversees a bunch of, like, housing development money that comes in from HUD — and then [the] local Hazardous Waste Management, King Conservation District Advisory Board, the Mental Illness Drug Dependency Advisory Committee. All the things, yeah.”

Her work at the Sound Cities Association got her called up to her most notable job, as the director of Sub-Regional Planning and Equitable Engagement for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA). There, besides wrangling wayward cities into the authority’s interlocal agreement, in which they give their homelessness money to the KCRHA to spend in a regionally strategic way, she shepherded the organization’s five-year plan through the approval process of its two oversight boards. Okay, we realize your eyes probably glazed over after that sentence of a job title, but bear with us: Rinck’s work with the KCRHA is the subject of one of Woo’s main criticisms in this race.

You see, the five-year plan drew ire from all around because of its price tag: $12 billion. We very obviously don’t have that money on hand, no matter how many cities in King County agree to pitch in. Moderates and conservatives pretending to be reasonable moderates eviscerated the plan, calling it unrealistic. Despite that initial criticism, Rinck says, she and her fellow staffers were able to revise the plan and get it past both the implementation committee and the governing committee. While Rinck is proud of the document that ultimately emerged, Woo and whoever is funding her independent expenditure committees have fixated on the initial number, accusing Rinck of wanting to spend irresponsibly and having unrealistic ideas about homelessness.

To be fair, the agency was asked to come up with an estimate for what it would cost to truly end homelessness and, as someone who has spent a lot of time assessing the scope of the problem, this journalist is not at all shocked by that number. That said, Woo is hoping voters will be, though Rinck has been clear that she is not proposing to spend $12 billion on homelessness and never has.

“She's really resorting to spreading misinformation about bodies of work that I've done – things that can be easily disproved and have been,” Rinck says of Woo. “I can't stand by the spread of misinformation, especially about homelessness. Our region has suffered enough from that.”

In our interview, Woo did not directly attack her opponent, except to frame the choice voters are facing as being between a “bureaucrat” and “community,” with it being pretty obvious who the bureaucrat was. Ads for her campaign have framed Rinck as much worse, including one which disingenuously compared her participation in a protest that marched to city councilmembers’ houses as being similar to KKK intimidation tactics, an accusation that’s hard to swallow when the person in question is about 5’2” and very excited to show you their pet rock.

That said, Woo’s softer framing does sum the race up pretty well. Do we want a wonk with lots of very detailed ideas about how to improve the city, or do we want a longtime community member with lots of feelings about how the city should be?

“I think being a nerd is a part of this; I think a core part of being a nerd is [saying], ‘Hey, let's actually look at the facts. Let's look at some data here,’” Rinck says. “I do think for a solid sect of the city, they want that kind of thoughtfulness from their decision makers because things have become super divisive. There's a lot of ideologically fueled decisions that are happening, and that's not how things should be going.”

As the election draws near, it seems like voters agree. While Woo is right that an even-year election could potentially double the size of the electorate, it may just mirror primary results. As The Urbanist recently reported, Rinck’s advantage in the primary was not due to a surge of new, progressive voters desperate to unseat Woo. The electorate was, in fact, demographically similar to 2023, suggesting that Seattle voters are perhaps seeing the tough-on-crime talk that carried Woo’s fellow conservatives to victory for what it is: a lot of talk.

Indeed, the mayor’s current policy towards encampments — sweeping them, which Woo supports — has done next to nothing to eliminate said encampments. It has, as its detractors have warned over and over and over again, only moved them around. Rinck, on the other hand, supports the approach taken in the KCRHA’s Right of Way project, which involves a much longer outreach effort that aims to get rid of encampments by getting the people living in them alternate housing and other help. Purpose Dignity Action (PDA), which helped with some of the highway-adjacent encampments addressed by the Right of Way program, calls this the JustCARE approach, which has posted some pretty incredible success rates since its inception.

That they are drastically different candidates is clear, but what’s less clear is what happens if (when?) Rinck wins. While she and current District 2 Councilmember Tammy Morales are closely aligned, they would be very much in the minority on the council. Woo, on the other hand, has the support of all of her fellow councilmembers save Morales, plus the mayor, and has voted in lockstep with that bloc. So while a Mercedes Rinck victory on Nov. 5 might send a strong message, would it really matter, with seven of nine councilmembers still showing up for tough-on-crime policies and more cop funding?

Yes, she says.

“I mean, that's kind of the heart of the work and something I'm actually really skilled in and have done now and across a few different agencies,” she says. “Like, let's just really talk through, have a challenging conversation. Let's disagree a bit.”

Come Nov. 5, she may get her wish.

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