For my debut as a South Seattle Emerald columnist, I was supposed to write about new Seattle City Councilmember Mark Solomon. This column's goal is to cut through the noise of state and local politics, helping people sort out what the policies and people involved will actually do as opposed to what they say they will do.
So let's start by getting to know the guy stepping into former District 2 City Councilmember Tammy Morales’ shoes. The current council majority is composed almost entirely of Morales’ biggest haters, and in choosing Solomon, they found a new and different way to reiterate that — Solomon is Morales' failed challenger from the 2019 City Council elections. Prior to that campaign, he was the crime prevention coordinator for the Seattle Police Department (SPD), a position he still holds.
Thing is, despite the research I did, I honestly don't have much to say about the man.
What does he stand for? Well, his 2019 campaign was funded primarily by moneyed real-estate interests, Amazon executives, and the Amazon cutout that is the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce (not to mention the truly outstanding individuals over at the Seattle Police Officers Guild). Those groups paid quite a bit of money to help elect seven of the eight councilmembers Solomon will be joining, and that bloc has pretty consistently voted for more cash for cops, less spending on social services, and — read their lips — no new taxes.
Seems likely Solomon will be joining the party, but to draw a bead on his more recent politics, I watched his appearance at Seattle CityClub's Jan. 21 candidate forum and gave his application for appointment a close read. My main takeaways are that he seems nice enough, but he doesn't have many specific ideas about what he wants to do on council.
He says he's interested in "bringing the comprehensive plan across the finish line," which I assume means voting in Mayor Bruce Harrell's version of that plan, which seems fairly likely to pass, NIMBYs be damned. Besides that, he hopes to resurrect a bafflingly useless piece of legislation first proposed by recently unseated District 8 appointee Tanya Woo that would slap regulations on after-hours clubs. Like everyone else in this city, he would also like to "address crime, disorder and human suffering in the Little Saigon neighborhood." To do it, he wants to work with "stakeholders."
At the CityClub forum, he committed to a position on closing Lake Washington Boulevard to cars — he's against it, citing a lack of community engagement. He also weighed in on Sound Transit's relationship with the Chinatown-International District (CID) — also bad, for the same reason.
"Sound Transit needs to rebuild the trust — or actually earn the trust — of the people in the CID," he said, "because many folks in the CID feel like they've been lied to. Sound Transit hasn't been an honest broker, and they haven't done enough engagement regarding the citing."
Moving on to lighter topics, like fentanyl, he was on the same page with every politician (and, presumably, regular person): "There's no question that we need more mental health supports, more caseworkers, more drug treatment interventions. We currently don't have enough."
Because some people on the street are in crisis, they might also be self-medicating, he suggested, leading to further crises.
"There is an intersectionality there," he concluded.
And that's when I realized I do have a lot to say about Solomon. Or maybe not Solomon specifically, but something he represents: the slow, creeping co-option of the language of the left in service of the goals of the right and center-right.
Nowhere was this phenomenon more clear than in a recent fundraising email from City Council President Sara Nelson. At the end of a section outlining her office's accomplishments, Nelson's staffer left in a placeholder for "[something more left-leaning]."
If not for the laziness of Nelson's communication staff, however, we would probably have gotten something positively rose-tinted. Typically, the co-option is not so nakedly cynical. The language of the left is, frequently, the language of caring, and caring is kind of subjective. If someone claims to care deeply about the plight of homeless people, if they speak frequently about a "compassionate" approach, it's hard to disprove them caring, because only they know the truth. Of course, you can — and should — closely examine what they actually do (relentlessly sweeping homeless people and throwing away their belongings, for example) to get a sense of whether they really care, but even then, it's easy for politicians to say they're doing something because they care.
Criminalizing drug use? Well, it's because we want to help individuals suffering from addiction, actually. We're going to — oh yeah, that's good — meet them where they're at and connect them to culturally relevant treatment services. That we haven't budgeted for or brought online yet. But, uhh, we have to invest deeply in communities to support our most vulnerable neighbors. Or something.
What I'm saying is, if you're struggling in this city, all this word salad ain't gonna help you eat. All it really does is confuse the issues, and that, I'd argue, is the intent. When we drill down and look at what the politicians who go in for this jargony, vague language are doing, it's not stuff most people would be proud of.
This happens in the U.S. and abroad, of course, but Seattle offers an especially good example, as it's a city where one has to keep up appearances as a good liberal to get anywhere in politics. Even if a politician holds views that are completely opposed to even the modest asks of the city's center-left, usually described as "progressives," that politician must still pay lip service to the idea that they care about the poor, the addicted, the unhoused, etc. They must continue to "center voices" and "engage with communities" and get input from "stakeholders."
Nevermind that community engagement is often invoked in service of obstructing any sort of serious initiative that would improve the lives of Seattle residents, like a truly robust light rail system or the siting of more homeless shelters and treatment facilities or adjusting zoning to allow cheaper, more plentiful housing.
Speaking of cheaper, more plentiful housing, there's the special election for Propositions 1A and 1B, concerning funding for the city's newly minted social housing developer.
No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, and no matter where you sit on social housing, you should want politicians to be straight with you. The advocacy group associated with social housing, House Our Neighbors!, is being straight with voters — engaging with the community, if you will — by asking them whether they want to levy a 5% tax on compensation over $1,000,000 for large corporations here, earning the developer an estimated $50 million each year.
What the mayor and the council are doing, to be clear, is using their power as elected officials to obfuscate a pretty clear yes-or-no question: Do we want big business to pay a payroll tax on extremely high earners to build public housing?
How are they doing that? By trying to confuse the issue, of course. First, they moved the whole question off last year's big, high-turnout November ballot, sequestering it to the famously low-turnout February special election slot. Then, to really add some icing to the cake, they topped it off with a perfidious, unnecessary, and confusing second option that would give the social housing developer far less money and take that money from existing revenue.
Their proposal, 1B, earmarks $10 million per year from the JumpStart tax for the social housing developer. This being Seattle, it also adds hoops for the developer to jump through and leaves a lot up to the Office of Housing director, a Harrell appointee. If the developer doesn't succeed in three years of hoop jumping, the money goes back in the pot — and it's easy to believe the people holding the hoops want that to happen.
But one of the main criticisms of the social-housing project was that it would cut into the limited money we had for our region's other affordable housing entities. And that is exactly what the mayor and council's proposal would do. If you're curious why, just look at who's backing the Yes on 1B campaign:
Indeed, the exact businesses that would have to pay this tax. A tax they can absolutely afford to pay, by the way.
While everyone has their opinion about social housing, the simple fact is that its supporters are trying to levy $50 million in new funding every year to build more affordable housing in one of the most unaffordable cities in the country. We probably need more than that, but we desperately need at least that.
And while we need, at bare minimum, politicians who won't get in the way of that, what we really need are politicians who want to do big things. We can no longer afford politicians who want to obstruct progress in service of the same bereft-of-ideas business interests that have steered our city into its current state. We can't afford politicians who are so afraid of attaching their name to something, especially something that might upset their well-heeled backers, that they never do anything.
Even if you disagree, and I've read enough Reddit to know many of you do, I hope you take away one thing: Everyone at every point on the political spectrum should be paying much closer attention to what their elected representatives do (or don't do!) rather than what they say. And who pays them to do it.
As a 501(c)(3) organization, the South Seattle Emerald™ cannot endorse candidates or political campaigns.
The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.
The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.
Help keep BIPOC-led, community-powered journalism free — become a Rainmaker today.