By Erica C. Barnett
City Councilmember Tammy Morales, who was just reelected to her Southeast Seattle seat last year, is resigning from the city council effective January 6. Morales spoke with PubliCola in her City Council office on Monday morning. She announced her decision on Thursday morning, just one day after Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a progressive and the youngest person ever to serve on the city council, had her official public swearing-in.
Morales said she started thinking seriously about leaving the council in September, after she "went home and screamed at my family" following a confrontation on the council dais.
"I think that made me realize that I am anxious going out on the dais now, because I never know when I'm going to get attacked for saying something," Morales said. "It just made me realize that I am not able to represent my constituents, because I'm being attacked regularly and being undermined in the work that I'm trying to do."
Progressives who have looked forward to having two progressive women on the council—Alexis Mercedes Rinck just took office after beating appointed councilmember Tanya Woo in November—may feel betrayed by Morales' decision. Teresa Mosqueda, who also left the council early (Woo took over her former position when Mosqueda won a county council seat in 2023), tried to talk her out of it. But Morales said two progressives would still be outnumbered at least until the next big council election in 2027, and she's unconvinced that she, personally, could ever be effective with a council that blames her for every decision made by the previous council.
"I'm excited about Alexis being here. I think she's going to do great things," Morales said. "But even if [I had stayed], we're still two people, and together, we're not going to have the power to do very much." That includes Councilmember Cathy Moore's proposed capital gains tax, which Joy Hollingsworth and Dan Strauss seem likely to oppose if it starts to look too viable. (Hollingsworth already switched her vote, making Strauss the swing if it ever comes up again). And, she added, "there's just my personal responsibility to my family, my mental health, [and] my staff. My team have been treated very shabbily" by other council offices, she said.
Morales doesn't recall the specific incident that made her start questioning whether it made sense to stay or go, but there have been plenty to choose from over the past 11 months—starting with the new council's decision, in January, to appoint the person Morales had just defeated, Tanya Woo, to a citywide council seat.
The council's decision to ignore the will of the voters and award themselves a supermajority was widely viewed as a foregone conclusion. Since then, Council President Sara Nelson—who endorsed all six new members, including now-former councilmember Woo, and campaigned on their behalf—has worked to shore up her united front, forcing central staff members to edit reports to be more favorable to the majority perspective, and boxing Morales out of policy discussions.
Since the beginning of her second term, several of Morales' new council colleagues have treated her as the personification of the previous city council, conflating Morales—who, until Rinck joined the council last month, was the council's lone progressive—with socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant.
The vilification has often been open and explicit.
In April, for example, new Councilmember Cathy Moore accused Morales of telling the media that her colleagues were "evil... corporate shills" because they opposed her Connected Communities pilot, which would provide density bonuses to some small, community-based affordable housing developers. There is no evidence Morales ever said anything of the sort. It does, however, sound a lot like Sawant, who left the council last year.
Morales worked on the pilot project for more than two years and held five committee meetings to inform her new colleagues about what it would do. But, she said, "it was very clear from the beginning that they had no interest in learning about it. They were just not going to support it. And then Cathy accused me of saying things about her that I had never said, conflating me with Kshama. And that's been sort of the theme all year—they think I'm Kshama, and they treat me like Kshama."
Later in the year, when Morales urged the council to release the full $20 million from a 2023 JumpStart tax increase earmarked for student mental health, new council members lashed out at her, accusing her of failing to do due diligence and using her as a stand-in for the terrible "previous council" (which, Morales noted, passed the JumpStart tax that saves the city budget every year, along with other progressive policies—like raising gig workers' minimum wage—that remain too popular for the new council to easily overturn.)
New Councilmember Maritza Rivera said the vote to fund student mental health last year was "arbitrary" and ill-informed, while her fellow newcomer, Bob Kettle, accused the previous council of having an “absolute lack of good governance… lack of coordination, lack of anything, really.” Rob Saka, another newbie, piled on, claiming the old council had "no rational basis" for supporting the funding increase.
Rivera also falsely accused Morales of manipulating and lying to the public when she sent out an action alert about Rivera's plan to strip funding from the Equitable Development Initiative, which helps fund many projects in her Southeast Seattle district. EDI supports long-term community-led capital projects such as renovations, affordable housing, and child care centers; Rivera's proposal would have stripped these projects' funding unless every EDI recipient spent down all their existing city funds in the next two months. When Morales' constituents showed up to advocate for their programs, Rivera accused Morales of "irresponsibly" spreading "disinformation" and confusing community groups. Rivera ultimately dropped her bill in favor of legislation subjecting EDI recipients to special reporting requirements.
Morales has also seen uncontroversial legislation that she worked on for years, like a density bonus for certain small community-based housing developers, go up in flames for no obvious reason except that she was the one proposing it. During the recent budget process, when budget chair Dan Strauss told every council member to identify a few top-priority items for inclusion in a "consent package," Morales' priorities were the only ones to get removed from the package and defeated, a violation of longstanding council practice.
"Nobody has ever bothered to ask me why I have the priorities I have. There's just been this assumption that I represent something that the previous council did, and so nothing I do is worth consideration," Morales said.
A majority of the council even opposed a proposed expansion of a Seattle Department of Transportation program that gives residents a say in what SDOT projects get built in their area. Morales wanted to tweak the program to increase access to city funding for marginalized communities. The program, part of the city's transportation levy, survived because Rivera and Nelson abstained from the vote, but only after council transportation committee chair Rob Saka derided the entire project as a "slush fund."
As the council's only consistent progressive, Morales has found herself on the losing end of many 8-1 votes. These have included votes against a budget bill that increased spending on police recruitment ad campaigns; a vote against the new law establishing "stay out" zones for people accused of drug use or sex work; and a vote against a new CCTV surveillance program that added $10 million to the Seattle Police Department's budget at a time when the city is supposedly strapped for cash. Morales was also the only council member to vote against a new police contract that makes Seattle rookies the highest-paid in the state while doing almost nothing to improve accountability.
In a first, Morales even voted against the recent budget, which lavished new funding on police while cutting human services and removing all spending restrictions on the JumpStart tax, which was explicitly passed to fund programs that benefit economically vulnerable Seattle residents.
Morales said she never expected to "have a lot of policy agreements with this group of council members," who supported her opponent, Tanya Woo, and have formed a more or less united front behind Council President and Mayor Bruce Harrell. What did surprise her, she said, was how few of them showed any interest in working with her at all.
"I didn't agree with [centrist former councilmember] Alex Pedersen on anything either, and we had a great working relationship because there was transparency and candor and a willingness to talk," Morales said. Eventually, the two worked together on legislation that would have provided some transparency into what landlords charge in rent, which Harrell vetoed.
Morales said she's also been disturbed by the council's crackdown on public dissent. Since the election, the new council has limited public comment, kicked left-leaning activists out of council chambers, and even had them arrested for refusing to leave. The council has never relished hearing the public criticize their decisions, but until this year, they almost never shut down council chambers, called in police, or retreated to their private offices to conduct public business out of view.
This year, in surprisingly short order, these practices became routine—culminating in a wild meeting where Nelson cut off public comment on the social housing initiative, I-137, called multiple recesses, then reconvened the council from their secure offices, where they voted to delay the initiative in what Morales called “one of the most undemocratic moments I’ve seen in Seattle."
"Whenever we speak up for the community that I'm here to represent, we get attacked. When community members show up ... they also get attacked." Morales said.
Nelson has also ordered council staff to scrub memos that contradict the political views of the majority, undermining the authority of the politically neutral central staff. The "toxic environment," Morales notes, has led an unusually high number of council staffers to leave, including some central staffers who have been at the city, serving under dozens of different council members, for years.
Ironically, Council President Nelson went out of her way last month to praise Woo for turning out dozens of elderly Chinatown residents to oppose the expansion of a homeless shelter in SoDo last year, before Woo joined the council. (Nelson emphasized how impressed she was that so many elderly people walked to City Hall). The 90-bed expansion would have included the region's first shelter for medically fragile people and a permanent site for the county's sobering center; Woo helped popularize the right-wing talking point that the project would be a "homeless megaplex," eventually leading County Executive Dow Constantine to abandon it.
Morales said she's disturbed by what she calls new councilmembers' "unquestioning loyalty to the mayor's priorities... without asking what the impact will be." Sending misdemeanor defendants to the SCORE jail in Des Moines, a proposal backed by Harrell and Republican City Attorney Ann Davison, could create expensive logistical problems and deprive people of adequate legal counsel. Criminalizing "loitering" and drug use could create backlogs at the city's municipal court, which hasn't received any new funding for additional judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys who would be required to handle the new influx without overwhelming the court.
"There's supposed to be checks and balances here, and we don't have that anymore," Morales said. "What I see is the entire administration shifting toward more ways to criminalize people, put people in jail, and clean people off the streets, and much less interest in moving in a meaningful way to come up with real solutions to the problems everybody's complaining about." During the second Trump administration, when cities that have been sanctuaries for immigrants, people seeking abortions, and LGBTQ+ people seeking community and medical care, Seattle is going to have a target on its back, "but I don't think we're acting in a very progressive way," she said.
Morales says she doesn't have a specific plan for what comes next; she has multiple family members with medical issues, and said she needs some time to decompress and recover from "a hard year.”
"I've already grieved about the second term that could have been," she said. "I was looking forward to the comprehensive plan, to trying to get more neighborhood centers, to pushing for more development in the Rainier Valley, and that's not work I'll be able to do." She said she hopes her departure will "make space for somebody who will not be treated the way I'm being treated, and who can represent the district" effectively. "There's a lot of incredible talent in the South End, and maybe somebody who's not me can actually serve the district better."
The council will have to appoint another person to represent Morales' district, and that person will have to stand for election next year—as will Rinck, who is serving out the remainder of Mosqueda's four-year term.
This makes me sad, but it makes more angry at the Council majority. I cannot wait until we can vote these shills out of office and Harrell along with them.
You have to be able to lose over and over and over again, in order to win. Disappointing she is stepping down.