Everything Is Political … in South Seattle: Political Integrity, With Extra Anchovies

City Council Looks to Legalize *checks notes* Literal Self-Dealing?!

Last Thursday, May 8, the Governance, Accountability & Economic Development Committee met for an absolute slugfest over District 5 Councilmember Cathy Moore's bill to do away with ethics rules banning councilmembers from voting on matters in which they have a direct financial interest. Well, it didn't actually come to blows, but it was packed full of the type of passive-aggressive verbal jousting that substitutes for blows among the elected officials in Seattle.

"Man, can you imagine the public outrage if the 2019 Council had proposed an ethics rollback of this scope and scale?" former Councilmember Andrew Lewis said, when I texted him for his take later that afternoon. While he's right to feel the current council is getting away with legislation that would have had him and his former colleagues tied from the Westlake arch by their ankles, it's not like people were fine with this thing.

Besides every single public commenter speaking against the measure, former Councilmember Kshama Sawant showed up at the meeting and got into a shouting match with Council President Sara Nelson, while, as reported by Marcus Harrison Green, an impromptu caucus of state lawmakers sent a letter to councilmembers warning they "will not stand by if you try to rig the system in your favor."

Under the new law, the council's landed gentry — District 2's Mark Solomon and District 4's Maritza Rivera own rental property — would be allowed to vote on some soon-to-be-introduced tenant protection rollbacks. If that turns out to be the ploy here (an allegation Solomon seemed to directly address in his comments), "rolling back ethical standards" — which sounds pretty bad on its own — will somehow not be the most cartoonishly evil aspect of this.

After a series of cutting questions from District 6's Dan Strauss, one of the only committee members outspoken in opposition to the bill, Moore offered some concluding remarks.

"It's a very heated, controversial topic; it seems like everything that we talk about in Seattle these days is heated and controversial," she sighed, before describing the bill as "just trying to get work done." Indeed, she has framed this as being about making sure more councilmembers can vote on things, thereby improving representation and getting things (don't ask what things) done more efficiently. Still, it's a funny bit of hand-waving to try to excuse something that — no matter how you slice it — opens the door to corruption.

Despite all of last Thursday's vigorous civic discourse, the committee did not vote to send the bill to full council. This was just the warm-up. Instead, councilmembers will have time to submit amendments before the committee's next meeting on May 22. While it seems an upsetting majority of committee members have given up on a core concept of democracy — not engaging in or even appearing to engage in self-dealing — perhaps Strauss can throw a stick in the spokes. Go get 'em, tiger.

Pizzanomics With Katie Wilson

You know, a big part of me wonders if mayoral hopeful Katie Wilson has the juice to oust Mayor Bruce Harrell, because she comes off as a bit of a wonk while his whole shtick is being Mr. Cool Sports Guy Mayor, but I'll be damned if she isn't right about a lot when it comes to policy. Like how a lack of affordable housing is directly to blame for why a slice at Big Mario's costs $8 now.

While her potential future colleagues on City Council were busy setting up an alley-oop to dunk on tenants' rights, Wilson was walking around Capitol Hill offering some hard-hitting, front-facing commentary on why we shouldn't be so quick to blame workers for things like $11 beers.

Obviously, watch the video, but I just wanted to chime in that I'm glad someone with some sort of pull in politics finally said it. As a restaurant worker, I cannot tell you how annoying the discourse around the recent minimum wage increase to $20.76 has been. It is almost exclusively small business tyrants (look up the term) crowing about how greedy their workers are. Or person-on-the-street interviews with people about how the price of a burger is just criminal these days. Yes, it is, but let's find the real culprit!

Wilson's video resonates because it connects the dots of rising wages, rising prices, and the insane, inflated housing costs that have driven that rise. The minimum wage is not funding lavish lifestyles; it is and always has been the lowest amount workers can still make things work on. In most places, including Seattle, it ain't even that.

Brian Is Back at It

Multimillionaire manure expert and conservative political activist Brian Heywood, to be specific, although the Beach Boys are playing a show in the area next month, so you could be forgiven if you thought I meant Brian Wilson. While we might all prefer the touching meditations on pain, loss, growth, and belonging that Wilson penned for Pet Sounds, rather than more anti-trans, anti-tax inanity, we are unfortunately not getting the better Brian here.

Heywood is hellbent on forcing another raft of initiatives onto the ballot, and he's already demonstrated his willingness to use his vast fortune to do so. He'll need 308,011 signatures, which is not so much when you think about how many busy, distracted, and easily propagandized people pass through grocery store parking lots across the state. And how many signature gatherers someone like Heywood, who made his money by running a hedge fund for the oil and gas industry, can hire. The initiatives also focus on topics that lend themselves well to oversimplification and fearmongering, like "boys in girls' sports" and "school choice."

Vivian McCall and Nathalie Graham penned a wonderfully detailed breakdown of all these bad ballot initiatives, but the broad strokes of this year's crop are banning trans kids from sports, capping property tax increases to an untenably low amount, reviving the invasive Parents' Bill of Rights that Democratic lawmakers just gutted in the Legislature, and siphoning money away from public schools to pay into private schools and homeschooling.

Best to keep these canards off the ballot, of course, so if you encounter someone in the wild waving a clipboard at you and talking about boys in the girls' locker room or parents' rights, loudly and publicly set them straight. And in anticipation of that not being enough, be the change you want to see in the world and become that incredibly annoying person who tells every registered voter in their life what these things would actually do. Lord knows your barista doesn't have time to be looking up ballot initiatives.

Got something *political* I should know? Tell me about it: tobias.cb@seattleemerald.org.

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.

Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is a writer, editor and restaurant worker who lives in South Park. He was formerly the associate editor of Real Change News, and his work has appeared in The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, Vice, Thrillist, Thrasher Magazine, Curbed, and Crosscut, among other outlets.