Cathy Moore Will Step Down After a Year and a Half On Council

Sources say Moore was fed up with the job, which requires enduring sometimes intense public criticism.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Cathy Moore will resign her position on July 7 after representing North Seattle's District 5 for a year and a half. PubliCola exclusively reported the news on Bluesky on Monday after confirming with multiple people familiar with Moore's decision.

Moore did not respond to our request for comment. She gave an exclusive interview to KOMO, the station that produced the infamous civic snuff film "Seattle Is Dying."

Although Moore cited unspecified health concerns in a late-afternoon press release, the sources we spoke to said Moore is fed up with the job, which involved listening to sometimes harsh public pushback from constituents who disagreed with her legislative priorities.

Most recently, Moore faced criticism of her proposal to amend the city's ethics code to allow city council members to shape and vote on legislation that presents a financial conflict of interest. That opposition included not just chants and shouts from former councilmember Kshama Sawant and members of her organization, Workers Strike Back, but emails and public comments fromhundreds of individual Seattle residents who opposed the proposed rollback of the council's ethical standards.

The legislation, which Moore withdrew last week, was widely seen as an effort to allow the council's two landlords, Mark Solomon and Maritza Rivera, to vote on upcoming legislation, also from Moore, to roll back eviction protections passed by the previous council. Last week, Solomon told PubliCola he was a "no" vote on Moore's legislation, after voting for the bill in committee.

Moore's distaste for the kind of public pushback that's part of the job she ran for was evident from the very start of her term. In February 2024, when the council was still busy patting itself on the back for their camaraderie and commitment to Mayor Bruce Harrell's "One Seattle Agenda," Moore demanded that police arrest a group of demonstrators who were protesting outside council chambers, claiming they posed a "physical threat to the safety of each one of us. "Arrest those individuals," Moore told police, adding that this kind of protest was "not to be tolerated."

After that initial salvo, Moore would frequently object to the way people voiced their opposition to legislation, suggesting that it represented a new kind of incivility toward council members from a small segment of the public. In fact, Seattle has a long tradition of rowdy protest against council actions, going at least back to the Teen Dance Ordinance, when a dance-based protest led Margaret Pageler (the Cathy Moore of her day) to chase one of her constituents around the room at a public meeting.

Moore's departure will almost certain mean the end of the road for her ethics rollback bill, which faced an uncertain future already.

It could also mean the end of her proposal to roll back eviction protections.

Moore's legislation, according to sources familiar with its text, would have repealed the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums; overturned a law allowing tenants to add new roommates without prior approval; revised the process for landlords to file three-day eviction notices; and eliminated the requirement that landlords offer tenants the opportunity to renew their lease when it expired, among other rollbacks.

Moore passed little legislation during an impact during her brief time on council. Her biggest legislative achievement was passing a law that re-criminalized so-called "prostitution loitering" (targeting sex buyers instead of sex workers) and reinstated a "Stay Out of Prostitution Area" zone along the length of Aurora Avenue North. She also directed funding originally intended for groups that work with former sex workers on Aurora to The More We Love, a group started by a Kirkland real estate broker named Kristine Moreland that began as a for-profit company offering private encampment "sweeps" in Burien.

Moore was less successful in her efforts to revise the city's comprehensive plan, the document that determines how much new housing can be built in Seattle and where, to make it harder to build apartments in her district and around the city. Moore attempted repeatedly to water down legislation to implement House Bill 1110, the bill that requires the city to allow at least four housing units on every residential lot—first suggesting that every privately constructed fourplex should have to include affordable housing, a proposal that would have ensured that no such housing got built, then proposing an amendment to require 20-foot yards in front of every new low-density development.

The comprehensive plan has been pushed into next year, and the bill to allow fourplexes passed without Moore's amendment.

Moore also didn't manage to amend the city's tree code to make it harder for property owners to remove trees they own, a priority she brought up often during discussions about development.

Nor did she pass a capital gains tax as part of last year's budget, or bring the idea up again in the six months since then.

She did manage to throw a wrench in plans to relocate Tent City 4, a sanctioned encampment, within her district; instead of staying a year at the Lake City Community Center as previously planned, Tent City 4 will have to move elsewhere within one to six months.

Once Moore leaves on July 7, the council will have 20 days to appoint a replacement—a process that has become familiar to this council, which previously appointed Tanya Woo to replace Teresa Mosqueda and Mark Solomon to replace Tammy Morales, who resigned after what she described as relentless bullying by her fellow council members at the beginning of 2025. Whoever gets the appointment will serve until November 2026, when there will be another election to determine who represents District 5.

Calling around on Monday about potential candidates, we learned that a number of previous contenders and progressive advocates who live in the district are not interested in the job. One person who just might be, though, is Housing Development Consortium Patience Malaba—who gave a polite no-comment (not a no!) when we asked if she was interested in running for the position.