City of Seattle

Sofia Aragon is the other progressive running for King County Council, District 8. Aragon became the first Filipino immigrant to be named mayor of Burien and has served on the Burien City Council since 2020. She is a registered nurse and the executive director of the Washington Center for Nursing. As an attorney, she advocated for healthcare for all and workplace safety in Washington.

Under her mayorship, Burien became the first city in Washington to issue a proclamation against anti-Asian hate and passed a slate of tenant protection laws. She also voted to renew Burien's affordable housing program, although she voted against the initial proposal that would have expanded and improved it.

One notable difference between Aragon and her opponent Mosqueda is their view on policing. Aragon blames efforts to defund the police for Burien's struggles with crime. Although Aragon supports health and social services for people experiencing homelessness, her pledge to "assure an adequate police presence" indicates a more punitive approach to public safety than Mosqueda's.

Disappointingly, Aragon was part of a 4-3 majority on the Burien City Council that removed the Burien Planning Commission chair, Charles Schaefer, for his outreach to people experiencing homelessness in the community. This event generated significant backlash, including the resignation of 11 other members of boards and commissions. At the time of the vote, the City Council had failed to act on King County's offer of $1 million and 35 pallet shelters to create a sanctioned encampment. While Aragon has many good policy positions, her behavior during this recent event should be a major concern for progressive voters. 

Also running in this race is perennial candidate Goodspaceguy, who is not running a serious campaign.

Jesse Tam is the managing director for Mega Pacific Investments, a strategic development consulting firm. He is a former parks commissioner for the city of Newcastle, as well as past president and current board director for the Greater Seattle Chinese Chamber of Commerce, among other roles.

Tam states that he's running to use his business experience to source well-paying union jobs, negotiate business deals, and lead on climate change. While we agree with Tam's listed priorities, Felleman has been an excellent environmental advocate and scientific mind on the board, and we don't see a strong case for how Tam would bring progressive change to the port.

Aaron Todd is the CEO of Airsafe, a site that indexes information on airline safety and flight information for travelers. A former Boeing safety engineer and a U.S. Air Force veteran, Todd has not presented any policy reasons on why he should replace Felleman's deep expertise on the commission.

There are 7 other candidates in the crowded race for city council from District 1 this year: Preston Anderson, Rob Saka, Phil Tavel, Jean Iannelli Craciun, Stephen Brown, Mia Jacobson, and Lucy Barefoot.

Preston Anderson is an Army veteran and former medic who currently works as a clinical social worker for Puget Sound Health Care. He also serves as the membership chair of the Chief Sealth High School PTSA. But in our interview with Anderson, we were disappointed in his ideas to tackle the affordability crisis. For example, when asked where the city should build more affordable housing, Anderson suggested annexing White Center. In addition, he would not give interviewers a direct answer on whether or not he supports sweeps of homeless encampments. 

Sociologist Jean Iannelli Craciun is the founder of the Diversity Center of Seattle Washington, a diversity, equity, and inclusion organization. Her campaign priorities include revitalizing Pioneer Square through small businesses, though she isn't specific on how. Her housing platform is a bit more robust. Craciun wants to expand housing by increasing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), for example, and believes there should be mandatory wage increases for homelessness service providers to keep those workers themselves out of poverty. She does not say how she would pay for such services and is a "maybe" on increasing existing taxes on big corporations like the Jumpstart tax, as well as a "maybe" on increasing or decreasing the police budget or the number of police officers. 

Air Force veteran and cybersecurity lawyer Rob Saka is running, in his words, to center progressive values and common sense. He formerly served on the county's charter review commission, which helped moved the county sheriff from an elected position to an appointed one. However, Saka's campaign is somewhat low on specific details that make it unclear exactly how he would vote if elected to the council. In his interview with the Stranger, he said that the city needs more police officers, but declined to say how many or how the city could increase the number of unarmed officers, which he has proposed. Saka was a no on increasing the JumpStart tax on businesses grossing over $8 million to pay for affordable housing and rent control, but a yes on continuing sweeps of the homeless according to The Seattle Times. 

Voters may remember Phil Tavel from his 2015 and 2021 runs for Seattle City Council, including his visits to conservative talk radio shows to repeat tired myths about how getting tough on unsheltered people would uplift them out of homelessness. Amazon and other big businesses dropped $1.5 million, including hundreds of thousands in Tavel's race to secure corporate-friendly candidates, though he ended up losing by 11 points in the general election. Tavel is again running a divisive campaign where he point-blank refuses the multitude of research that shows that homelessness is an issue of affordable housing and promises that he can create a single organization for all services and shelters to dispense care.

Mia Jacobson also has yet to raise any funds, and her campaign website is focused on changing how government works to center on public opinion. She would open up committee meeting minutes, proposals, policies, and agendas to digital public comment 24 hours a day, for example, and require all elected representatives to answer every non-destructive public comment. In probably the most surprisingly set of Seattle Times questionnaire answers, Jacobson answered 'Maybe' to everything - maybe to more or less police funding, maybe to upzoning, maybe to investing in substance abuse treatment for people in public housing. 

Stephen Brown is the president and founder of Eltana Bagels. Unfortunately, his approach to homelessness focuses on sweeps, which are costly, cruel, and simply move people to different parts of the city while doing little to actually solve the homelessness crisis.

Lucy Barefoot has yet to publish a website or release a detailed campaign platform as of mid-July.

Chinatown-International District (CID) small business owner Tanya Woo is the leading challenger to Morales for Seattle City Council from District 2. Her family ran the Mon Hei Bakery and later renovated the historic Louisa Hotel to have 84 units of workforce housing. 

Woo is a longtime advocate for the CID, including starting the CID Community Watch volunteer group in 2020 that walks the neighborhood to provide support and diffuse conflicts. Last year, she led a series of rallies against King County's proposal to expand a homeless shelter near the CID. County Executive Dow Constantine eventually canceled the project, which would have included 150 shelter beds and a tiny house village, because of the "community feedback."

Woo is now running for Seattle City Council to give a voice to CID residents who don't feel heard by elected leaders. She would focus on improving public safety, expanding community outreach in more languages, and protecting what she calls "one of the most endangered neighborhoods" because of gentrification. 

Also in this race is Green Party chair Margaret Elisabeth, who is running to bring a very progressive slate of policies to city hall. Elisabeth was a national delegate of the Lavender Green Caucus (LGBTQIA+) and is currently co-chair and media spokesperson for the caucus. They are also chair of the steering committee for the U.S. Green Party.

Elisabeth states that with a background in green activism, including "leave no trace" music and art festivals and community wellness services, they are ready to lead the city into prosperity. This includes setting a living wage of $25 per hour, citywide single-payer health care for every resident of Seattle, and universal funding for schools. Unfortunately, these proposals would likely be extremely cost-prohibitive given that the city is already facing a roughly $100 million budget gap.

There are six other candidates in the race for Seattle City Council from District 3. Andrew Ashiofu's name may be familiar to voters, as he ran last year for state Legislature. He serves as the chair of the Washington State Stonewall Democrats, co-chair of the Seattle LGBTQ Commission, and board member for People Of Color Against AIDS Network (POCAAN) and Gay City. He has also served on the King County HIV Planning Council, the Harborview Madison Clinic Community Advisory Board, and the Washington State Department of Health COVID Vaccine Implementation Council.

In our interview with Ashiofu, he described how being HIV-positive and formerly unhoused has motivated him to fight for the most vulnerable of the district. He stated that the city needs to reduce the timeline to build housing and that a housing-first policy would alleviate the issues of people needing to live on the streets. While he shared many similar progressive views as his opponents, Ashiofu mentioned a few unique specifics - adding sanitation centers that the houseless could use, as well as harm reduction centers and more civilian investigators to police oversight.

Deputy prosecuting attorney Efrain Hudnell works for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office. There are several positives about Hudnell's platform, including investing in alternatives to policing, supporting more therapeutic courts instead of jail time, and shifting away from surface parking lots to promote more commercial and residential housing. 

The biggest problem with Hudnell's record is that he joined the right-wing Federalist Society in 2017 as a law student at Seattle University. The organization is centered around conservative lawyers and is viewed as a pipeline for conservative Supreme Court justices, including Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch, the latter appointed in the very year Hudnell chose to join. Hudnell left the organization in the Spring of 2018, stating that a paid trip to see Clarence Thomas opened his eyes to the group's privileged, conservative agenda. 

Democratic socialist candidate Ry Armstrong is a queer artist and climate activist running to be the first openly queer candidate to represent District 3 (Ashiofu and Hollingsworth are also LGBTQ+), as well as the first openly nonbinary council member. They have high ambitions for the city, including establishing Seattle as a “right to shelter” and carbon-neutral city.

Their community experience includes serving as executive director of a small LGBTQ-focused nonprofit. While some of Armstrong's plans are interesting, like taxing corporations for carbon emission pollution, others are questionable, like asking the federal government to donate a retired battleship to retrofit into thousands of units of housing. Other ideas with uncertain prospects for funding include a mandate that Seattle provide shelter to anyone who needs it through a hotline and if the city cannot, it would be liable to fine itself. Though not easily funded, much of Armstrong's agenda is progressive, including seeking more affordable housing, rent control, alternatives to traditional policing, and more. For their ambitious agenda, they've been endorsed by the Seattle Green Party, King County Young Democrats, Green Party Washington, and Moms Demand Action among other organizations. 

Like Armstrong, cannabis producer Alex Cooley has good intentions in seeking alternatives to filling up our jails with people struggling with addiction and wanting to expand housing. But his desire to legalize all drugs and dedicate one million square feet to the unhoused in the form of a state park are likely nonstarters for public policy. 

Shobhit Agarwal describes himself as a first-generation gay immigrant from India who serves on the board for Trikone NW, a South Asian LGBTQ group. He wants to see more racially diverse police officers and to expand low-income housing through social housing, though this initiative will likely need additional funding to kickstart it, and Agarwal makes no mention of raising revenue for this or other programs. He also adds that he wants to "compartmentalize" homelessness, though he offers no details as to what that means. 

Public defender Bobby Goodwin is running to erase graffiti, stamp out ticket scalping, increase prosecutions, and increase mental health care access. 

Neither Goodwin nor Agarwal has significant organizational endorsements or political experience.

Davis faces several less progressive candidates in this race for Seattle City Council in District 4. Maritza Rivera works in Mayor Bruce Harrell's office as Deputy Director of the Department of Arts & Culture. Her number one campaign priority is public safety, in the form of getting 5-minute response times to 911 calls, taking "home and car break-ins seriously," and aggressively targeting people suffering from drug addiction. Like Ken Wilson, Rivera doesn't support rent control and wants the city to continue its expensive and inhumane sweeps of encampments. She has no firm stance on increasing revenue for the 400 additional officers she wants to hire, despite a projected city budget shortfall in the years to come.

Also in this race is civil engineer Ken Wilson, who is similarly focused on public safety. Like many candidates across the district this year, Wilson's top priority is more police. Amid a nationwide shortage of police, a serious budget shortfall for the years to come, and a lack of directive over what all these new officers would do beyond responding to 911 calls, we don't believe this is the most thoughtful public safety platform in District 4.

Voters should also review Wilson's stances from his run against Teresa Mosqueda in 2021. Two years ago, Wilson was not in support of rent control or regulations, stating that Section 8 and other financial assistance give renters enough control to individually provide themselves with their best housing situation. This of course excludes the many renters who don't have Section 8, and fails to adequately protect those who do. This year, Wilson says that the city should provide 18 to 24 months of transitional housing and a life-term plan with on-site professional support for people struggling with mental health issues. However, he also supports encampment sweeps, which have been proven to do immense harm and be a waste of taxpayer dollars. He also answered "maybe" to upzoning single-family housing in his Seattle Times questionnaire, which hardly fits his "pro-growth" strategy - more likely he is fine with upzoning already dense areas, as he mentions in his campaign bio, which forces growth in few neighborhoods and leaves wealthier tracts alone. 

Technology professional George Artem supports using public school funding for private and charter schools. He also supports more militarized policing and a return to the failed "War on Drugs" that led to massive increases in incarceration. Artem is not a progressive choice in this race. 

They are six more candidates competing for retiring Councilmember Debra Juarez's District 5 seat.

Shane Macomber is a payee coordinator at a behavioral health care service agency and a local real estate broker. Macomber also filed as a city council candidate in 2013. If elected, he wants to work on developing housing density around transit centers, improving job training and placement programs, expanding Seattle’s P-Patch programs to respond to food deserts, and investing in public infrastructure to improve livability and affordability for the growing Seattle population. However, when asked about his position on rent control, criminalizing addiction, and expanding the police staff, Macomber did not offer progressive solutions. Further, Macomber lacks elected and community leadership experience, and he has yet to receive endorsements from key progressive leaders and organizations in this race.

Justin Simmons has a long history in Seattle and its organizations. He is a four-term past president of the Metropolitan Democratic Club of Seattle and a past president of the Church Council of Greater Seattle. He served six years on the executive board of the 46th District Democrats, is an elected precinct committee officer in the 32nd Legislative District, has served on the Young Democrats of Washington Executive Board, and is a co-founder of the Progressive Democratic Caucuses of WA. Unfortunately, Simmons policy priorities include support for failed tactics like moving people experiencing homelessness from one area to another, and restricting more affordable types of homes from wealthy neighborhoods. 

Lucca Murdoch Howard is an 18-year-old candidate who is currently a student at North Seattle College. He is also a board member of the Aurora Reimagined Coalition, an organization set on re-envisioning the corridor's function and purpose. As a passionate transit advocate, Howard wants the Department of Transportation to plant more trees, widen sidewalks, and more along the corridor, while soliciting further community input on the design. He also wants to see parks within 15 minutes of every Seattleite, and funding for the social housing initiative paid for by a vacancy tax.

Rebecca Williamson also ran for Seattle City Council in 2021, and like this year also raised no money nor published a campaign platform.

There are five other candidates in the running for Seattle City Council from District 6. Pete Hanning owned Red Door in Fremont for twenty years and is currently the executive director for the Fremont Chamber of Commerce. Hanning's platform is one of the more conservative among the District 6 candidates. He agrees with Mayor Harrell's plan to hire 400 more police officers despite the city's $100 budget shortfall. In addition, Hanning does not want to increase revenue from large corporations through the Jumpstart tax. His questionnaire with The Seattle Times states that he does not want the city to raise any additional revenue at all, leaving voters to wonder how he intends to pay for proposed infrastructure revitalization on the West Seattle Bridge or continuing the expensive and inhumane practice of sweeping homeless encampments. 

Seattle Fair Growth president Jon Lisbin is running for Seattle City Council for a third time. This year, he's focused on maintaining Seattle's tree canopy and advocating for a housing-first approach. But according to The Seattle Times' questionnaire, he's a 'maybe' on some of the most important issues facing the city - including building more housing in single-family neighborhoods and looking for more revenue to continue city services at the same level. 

Lawyer Shea Wilson's campaign follows a familiar tune on public safety - a promise to hire yet more police officers, bringing the department total from 1,000 to 1,400. This near-impossible number comes amid a nationwide police shortage and an expected budget shortfall in the years to come. 

Dale Kutzera's plan for homelessness is mandatory protective custody and kickstarting an entirely new social services department. He also believes that the city will be able to rise out of the critical need for more housing of all types, including affordable housing, while not touching single-family zoning, which has been deemed unrealistic by housing advocates.

Victoria Palmer's campaign has the fewest concrete details of candidates in the race. She focuses on her distaste for lockdowns during the pandemic and her stance on public safety contains the same repeated falsehoods about police funding as Wilson’s.

Andrew Lewis faces five challengers in this race. Isabelle Kerner, a self-employed private investigator, unsuccessfully ran for the District 7 seat in 2019. In this campaign, Kerner has a vague platform that echoes some Republican talking points while failing to address real issues facing Seattle residents. 

Also in this race is police officer Aaron Marshall, who wants to employ a right-wing approach to the addiction and housing affordability crises. His platform advocates for adding to police budgets by redirecting funding from critical community services that help Seattleites access the resources they need.

Olga Sagan, a successful bakery owner, is running on a mixed platform that advocates for cutting some key public services and increasing militarized policing in our community while also protecting tenant rights and implementing environmental policy. 

Navy veteran Bob Kettle would ignore the public call for racial justice measures and community investments to instead invest even more in policing. If elected, Kettle would criminalize addiction and increase inhumane sweeps that don’t alleviate our housing crisis. 

Finally, Wade Sowders, a software engineer at Amazon, is running to dramatically incentivize development in housing, transit, and social programs. However, his platform is not as progressive nor implementable as that of Lewis.

Google manager and parent of two Ben Gitenstein describes himself as a frustrated progressive who doesn't have all the answers but is willing to ask hard questions. His website details his concerns with Seattle Public Schools and its board, including budgets and the shooting at Ingraham High that left one student dead. Unfortunately, he does not yet offer potential solutions to these issues as of mid-July other than bringing in new voices, which will naturally happen as there are two retiring incumbents this year. 

Gitenstein was the executive director of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance in the 2000s and has volunteered for school plays and fundraisers, but he does not appear to be actively involved in any school leadership positions like the PTA. His recommendation by The Seattle Times was based on what the editorial board describes as his urgency on school issues, "his appetite for real talk," and his distance from anyone who currently works with or in Seattle Public Schools. Based on local interviews, Gitenstein is definitely interested in fiscal oversight and addressing the enrollment drop, and voters looking for an outsider perspective might find a candidate in Gitenstein. 

A parent of three Seattle Public Schools kids, independent documentary filmmaker Evan Briggs says she's running to bring meaningful change and big-picture thinking as a director for District 3. She has served as chair of the parent-teacher organization at her children’s elementary school and is currently the Sand Point Elementary PTA representative on the Magnuson Park Advisory Committee.

Briggs wants to see more mental health professionals in schools as well as stronger relationships with service organizations in the community. She also states that the board should have clearer communication with parents and allow insight and access into the budget for families. On the budget, Briggs has stated that she will look to pare down administrative and consulting contracts that don't affect student performance. She's endorsed by retiring school board director Chandra Hampson, progressive King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay, and Seattle School Board President Brandon Hersey.

We agree with Briggs' priorities, though we hope to see more detail from her campaign if she moves to the general election.