Whoever wins this November’s election to Seattle City Council’s citywide Position 8 will be in the odd and unenviable situation of having to do it all over again next year. Rather than running for a full four-year term, candidates are vying to finish the final 13 months of former Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda’s term.
Mosqueda left the City Council in January after being elected to the King County Council. The City Council appointed Tanya Woo, a Chinatown-International District activist and business owner, to temporarily fill the vacancy. It is now voters’ turn to elect someone to the role.
Woo is running to finish the term against Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Saunatina Sanchez and Tariq Yusuf. A fifth candidate, Saul Patu, told the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission he had withdrawn from the race, but he will appear on the Aug. 6 primary ballot because he did so after King County’s deadline to be removed.
Though the next Position 8 Councilmember might hold office for only one year, that year promises to be filled with high-stakes issues to address.
The city is facing a projected budget deficit of at least $250 million next year that’s likely to remain an issue in subsequent years. On top of that, voters still rank homelessness, crime and public safety, and housing affordability as their top issues, according to an April poll by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.
With the Aug. 6 primary just around the corner, Cascade PBS looked at the candidates’ promises on the budget deficit and taxes, policing and public safety, and homelessness and housing, along with their campaign fundraising and major endorsements.
The candidates
Appointed incumbent Woo helped found the Chinatown-International District Community Watch during the pandemic to conduct safety patrols and do outreach to people experiencing homelessness. She and her family also own the historic Louisa Hotel, which was redeveloped into middle-income apartments after a 2013 fire.
Woo took her first run at political office in 2023 when she lost to incumbent District 2 Councilmember Tammy Morales. She leads fundraising in the current race with more than $219,000 in donations as of July 25. The Washington Realtors PAC has also spent $60,000 to support her campaign. Seattle City Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, Cathy Moore, Martiza Rivera, Rob Saka and Dan Strauss have all endorsed Woo along with former Gov. Gary Locke, state Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos and former King County Councilmember Larry Gossett.
Rinck is an assistant director at the University of Washington working on state budget and policy issues. Prior to that she held engagement and policy-analyst positions at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority and the Sound Cities Association.
Rinck has raised more than $146,000 in campaign contributions and has secured endorsements from more than a dozen local and state politicians and political and labor organizations. They include current Seattle Councilmember Tammy Morales and former Councilmembers Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis as well as state Sens. Noel Frame, Rebecca Saldaña and Yasmin Trudeau and state Reps. Darya Farivar, Gerry Pollet and Nicole Macri.
Sanchez is a longtime community organizer who has worked and volunteered with a swath of local progressive organizations, including the Transit Riders Union, Disability Rights Washington, the Seattle Renter Organizing Council and the League of Women Voters. The lifelong Seattleite and dedicated bicyclist and transit rider has raised more than $9,000 and garnered endorsements from the Transit Riders Union and the National Women’s Political Caucus WA chapter, which endorsed both Sanchez and Rinck.
Yusuf works on data privacy in the tech industry. He was born and raised in Seattle and grew up relying on social services and safety net programs, experiences that have shaped his worldview and political platform.
Yusuf has raised nearly $12,000. He does not list any endorsements on his campaign website.
The budget and taxes
As Seattle grapples with a projected $250 million budget deficit, there are two divergent ideas for dealing with it: looking at the existing budget to find places to cut and implementing new taxes to stave off cuts to services.
Woo, who will play a role in tackling next year’s deficit before her appointment ends, falls into the former camp, promising to adopt a “do more with what we have” approach to city budgeting.
Rinck, on the other hand, wants to impose new progressive taxes to avoid cutting homelessness, housing, food security and other human services programs.
Sanchez strikes a balance in between. She wants to first comb through the existing budget to make sure Seattle is spending wisely, but also wants to implement new tax options suggested by the city’s Progressive Revenue Workgroup.
Yusuf said the city has already leveraged a lot of revenue from businesses and would start with a review of how that money is being spent. He supports an income tax for the wealthy (an issue that would require statewide action) and wants to look for more grants and local partnerships to support the city budget.
Crime and policing
Seattle ended 2023 with a drop in reported property crime but a rise in violent crime and homicide compared to 2022. As is the case in cities across the U.S., Seattle has also seen an exodus of police officers and has struggled to fill vacancies, which some public safety officials have said will be difficult in the near term.
Woo has made public safety one of her top campaign issues, and promises to focus on fully staffing Seattle’s police and fire departments. She also wants to update policies and training for SPD officers, expand police alternatives such as the CARE department, enforce restrictions on public disorder and more.
Rinck wants to focus on upstream interventions to tackle the root causes of crime, violence interruption and diversion programs and new laws that work to keep guns out of peoples’ hands, as well as on alternative response programs like CARE, while focusing police response and resources on serious crimes.
Sanchez has a similar vision for public safety, with investments in diversion programs and CARE, as well as anti-poverty measures and violence interruption programs. She also wants to partner with King County to take a public health approach to the city’s overdose and behavioral health crises.
Yusuf wants clearer guidance for police officers, more community oversight and better relationships between officers and the communities they serve. He says doing so will “raise the bar in quality of service and care.”
Homelessness and housing
The intertwined issues of homelessness and housing affordability have topped Seattleites’ list of concerns for years and have continued to compound. In its most recent “point in time” count of unhoused residents, King County found more than 16,300 people experiencing homelessness, 23% higher than two years prior.
Woo wants to set new goals and performance expectations for existing homeless-service providers, invest in mental health and substance-use treatment, increase access to affordable housing and low-barrier shelters, bolster job training programs for people experiencing homelessness, and more.
On housing affordability, Woo says the city should build more market-rate housing and middle-income workforce housing and fight gentrification and displacement in lower-income neighborhoods.
Rinck wants to scale up investments in subsidized affordable housing, make changes to zoning in the comprehensive plan to increase housing density and variety, build high-density transit-oriented housing, and support community-based development, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color to help stop displacement. In addition, she wants to expand programs that help keep low-income people from falling into homelessness, such as emergency rental assistance and state-level limits on rent increases.
Sanchez wants to emulate New York’s guaranteed right to shelter to expand existing shelter options and help get people off the street. In addition, she supports the aims of the new social housing developer, wants to bolster renter protections along with improving clarity around both tenant and landlord rights and wants to change zoning laws to increase housing supply.
In his campaign platform, Yusuf calls homeless encampment sweeps inhumane and says the money spent on sweeps should be redirected to rehabilitative programs, bolstering the number of outreach workers and creating jobs programs. To address the affordability crisis, Yusuf says he would focus on preserving the existing support of affordable housing and on building more subsidized and mixed-income developments.
Get out and vote
King County mailed ballots on July 17. If yours got lost in the mail, you can print a new one from the King County Elections website. Ballots for the Aug. 6 primary must be returned by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
For more information about elections across Washington, check out Cascade PBS’s 2024 Statewide Voter Guide.