Last year was a much more innocent time for this City Hall reporter. I wasn’t so intimately familiar with the City’s Code of Ethics, I had never heard Council Member Rob Saka passionately rant about the strength of the Finnish people, and Council Member Sara Nelson was just someone to roll your eyes at in meetings, not the one running the show. I cannot reasonably detail every goof, gaff, and grave decision the council made this year, but I can borrow the Rose, Thorn, and Bud framework to more neatly package all the shit that unfolded at City Hall in 2024. by Hannah Krieg Last year was a much more innocent time for this City Hall reporter. I hadn't had to be so intimately familiar with the City’s Code of Ethics, I'd never heard Council Member Rob Saka passionately rant about the strength of the Finnish people, and Council Member Sara Nelson was just someone to roll your eyes at in meetings, not the one running the show. I cannot reasonably detail every goof, gaff, and grave decision the council made this year, but I can borrow the Rose, Thorn, and Bud framework to more neatly package all the shit that unfolded at City Hall in 2024. 🌹Rose🌹 The Stranger has not written too positively about the City Council this year, so I’ll switch things up and start by highlighting the three best moments in City Hall in 2024. And be happy I could come up with three.  Shame Works: After big business bought itself a shiny new City Council in the 2023 election, progressives quickly realized they would not find many allies in  City Hall. So instead of fighting for policies that make the city work better for working people, advocates spent much of the year playing defense against the new body’s most egregious actions. Surprisingly, looking back, progressive advocates actually managed to kill a few bills despite their sudden loss of influence. For example, Council President Sara Nelson appears to have given up on her attempts to rollback gig workers’ minimum wage, thanks in part to the organized labor, rank-and-file workers, and other advocates’ campaign against it. Similarly, workers and their unions effectively tanked Council Member Joy Hollingsworth’s bill to permanently enshrine a subminimum wage for tipped workers before it even got a hearing. Meanwhile, in one of the most spectacular displays of public shaming, community groups spent more than three hours in public comment berating Council Member Maritza Rivera for her “racist,” “discriminatory,” “ridiculous,” “preposterous,” “outrageous,” “appalling,” “tone-deaf,” “short-sighted,” “misguided,” and “ugly” attempt to freeze funding for the Equitable Development Initiative in a last minute amendment. Rivera swiftly backtracked, passing an amendment calling for more reporting without holding dollars hostage.   Comrade Cathy: But the left remains largely on the defensive. But, on the plus side, the council majority may be more fractured going forward. Council Member Cathy Moore recently broke ranks on a few key issues (this, however, comes after she championed racist, classist loitering laws and publicly scolded her colleague over literally nothing). During the budget negotiations, Moore proposed a local expansion of the statewide capital gains tax and delivered a multi-minute monologue that struck down every argument against progressive revenue effortlessly. She also popped off in a recent Public Safety Committee meeting, slamming the potential repeal of Seattle’s current restrictions on cops’ use of “less-lethal” crowd-control weapons. Moore plans to bring several amendments that could help increase oversight of the use of these weapons.  Biblically Needed: In perhaps the greatest win for area progressives in City Hall this year, Alexis Mercedes Rinck unseated Seattle’s fail daughter, appointee Tanya Woo, in a decisive special election for the position 8 citywide seat left vacant by former Council Member Teresa Mosqueda. Rinck campaigned as a defender of the working class, offering a critical counterpoint to the corporatists who spent much of their year quibbling over a failed attempt to repeal the gig worker minimum wage. As just one of nine council members (more on that later), Rinck’s not empowered to pass very bold legislation, and only time will tell if she can resist the conservative majority's gravitational pull. But she’s already making plays. In her first full council meeting, she brought forward an amendment to indicate the City’s support for new, state-level progressive revenue in their state legislative agenda. And it passed! Good for her! 🥀 Thorn 🥀 Okay, enough of that! Back to my element—what did we hate? Can I say the entire year? If you want to know all the ways the City Council sucked this year, I could refer you to every single thing I’ve written in 2024, but I understand that you’re here for a neatly packaged summary. Happy to oblige! Before the council began budget negotiations, I rattled off the 15 worst moments of the City Council’s unofficial legislative session. Thankfully, the council’s incompetence got the year off to a pretty slow start, and most of the council’s egregious behavior boiled down to political theater. As for what they actually accomplished, the council passed a few pro-cop measures—throwing 24 percent raises at the Seattle Police Department (SPD), passing a policy suite aimed to speed up the department’s hiring process, expanding SPD’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology, recriminalizing loitering, and establishing banishment zones around town.  JumpStart JumpStall: Y’all remember the housing crisis? Still happening! According to the Seattle Office of Housing, Seattle still needs 112,000 new homes by 2044, including 42,000 subsidized units like the ones funded by the JumpStart payroll expense tax and the Housing Levy. The budget the council passed does none of this. The Mayor and the City Council raided JumpStart’s revenue, once legally obligated to pay for affordable housing and a few other select priorities. The Mayor and his council also changed the JumpStart spend plan to allow the executive to bastardize the fund forever. This year, they decided to siphon off $300 million, depriving the City of potentially thousands of units of affordable housing and putting the City behind on its goals to solve the housing crisis. Gone Too Soon: After enduring a year of both interpersonal and political bullshit as the council’s sole progressive, Council Member Tammy Morales announced earlier this month that she would resign effective Jan. 6. Progressives felt representation strengthening as Rinck joined Morales and challengers lined up for Nelson’s re-election campaign. But unless the council picks a progressive (they won’t) then her departure puts the balance of power in pretty much the exact same place it was before November. And it totally kills any hope of a capital gains tax, which for a fleeting moment seemed in reach.  🌷Bud🌷  But wait, there’s more! The conservative slate that took over last January still has three years left in City Hall. Here’s what we’re dreading.  The Comprehensive Plan: The City is late in passing its once-in-a-decade Comprehensive Plan, which will determine Seattle’s growth for the next 20 years. Morales, who has actual planning experience, was supposed to run the process, but now that she’s out, the job falls to Hollingsworth. This will be an arduous process regardless of who is in charge, but Hollingsworth didn't have the best track record on supporting density before she joined council. And if we only judge by her actions on council, she’s not exactly advocating for density with a watchful eye to displacement, despite her claims. She voted against a common sense and totally free developer incentive that would have increased affordable density for projects that involved community groups.  Ethics Shmethics: As The Stranger uncovered, Nelson seems poised to weaken the City’s ethics standards after they curtailed her tyrannical campaign against the working class. Nelson previously tried to rollback protections for gig workers, including the minimum wage ordinance. But the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission foiled her plan when Executive Director Wayne Barnett advised then Council Member Woo to recuse herself from voting on the issue since she claimed the law would affect the sales at her family’s restaurant. Emails between Nelson, Barnett, and the council’s legal counsel suggest that she’s gearing up to change the standard. Instead of requiring council members to recuse themselves from votes involving their financial interests, the new approach would merely require them to disclose the conflict before voting. Landlord Wishlist: Renters should start gearing up for a big fight in early 2025. The landlord lobby, namely the Housing Development Consortium, wants to rollback a ton of tenant rights, according to a leaked slide deck outlining their legislative priorities. The “policy matrix” seeks to significantly limit the protection of the winter and school year eviction moratoriums, raise the $10 late fee cap to $50, repeal the 2019 roommate law, cut the six-month rental increase notice requirement to four months and just two in some cases, and implement other policies that benefit landlords. As you reflect on your own 2024, remember you could have done a lot worse. You could have been in the conservative majority of the City Council.