Council Committee Approves Bill Lowering Council Ethics Standards
The proposal, if it passes, will allow council members to vote on legislation even when they have a direct financial conflict of interest.

By Erica C. Barnett
A Seattle City Council committee to advanced legislation on Thursday that will revise the city's ethics code to allow council members to vote in their own financial interest, eliminating a longstanding law that requires council members to recuse themselves from votes that could benefit or harm them financially. The legislation now heads to the full council; if passed, it will overturn an ethical requirement that has persisted for more than 40 years, including a decade of district city council elections.
The legislation eliminates the requirement that council members abstain from voting on legislation on which they have a direct financial conflict of interest; instead, they'll merely have to disclose the conflict before they vote in committee and at full council meetings.
This lower standard will allow the council's two landlords, Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon, to vote on upcoming legislation to repeal several anti-eviction laws passed by the previous city council. Councilmember Cathy Moore, who is finalizing that legislation, has pushed to get the ethics changes passed before the vote, prompting opponents to point out that that two bills are obviously connected.
"There's no need to rush this. Unless there is," Councilmember Dan Strauss said. "If we see, in the next few weeks, legislation that will only pass because of the bill before us, then we'll know why this process is rushed."
The vote came at the end of a long, rancorous meeting. Former council member Kshama Sawant and a couple dozen of her supporters showed up to disrupt the comment portion of the meeting, punctuating nearly every public comment with chants like "Who needs to be thrown out? Maritza Rivera!" Sawant, who has been largely absent from local politics, briefly reemerged on the national stage last year when she joined Jill Stein's Abandon Harris campaign to defeat Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She's now promoting her new group, Workers Strike Back.
After about an hour of chanting and denunciations, committee chair Sara Nelson called a recess and most of the council retreated into their offices, continuing the meeting on Zoom while only Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a non-committee member who has voiced opposition to the bill, stayed in council chambers.
Strauss, who isn't on the committee, either, repeatedly tried to speak but was cut off by Nelson, who insisted Strauss' comments were out of order or eating into important committee time. Strauss eventually came back into council chambers, where opponents of the legislation snapped their fingers in support when he tried to speak and quietly jeered every time Nelson told him to be quiet.
No one testified in favor of the legislation, which appears to have no constituency beyond city council members with current or potential future financial conflicts of interest. Rinck said she'd received more than 1,300 emails opposing the legislation, most of them unique, along with just one email in support.
Council members who support the changes, along with Ethics and Elections Commission director Wayne Barnett, said requiring district council members to abstain from voting when they have financial conflicts deprives their constituents of "representation" on the council. District council members, Barnett argued, naturally pay more attention to their own constituents than citywide council members do. (This was the argument neighborhood activists made for district elections back in 2013).
Before Nelson cut him off, Strauss pushed back on this notion, saying that while he was elected by voters in District 6, he represents the entire city and his votes impact residents citywide. "I strongly disagree, because if I'm just going to look after my own district, then I'm not serving all Seattle," Strauss said. Rinck, one of two citywide council members (Nelson is the other), chimed in, saying she had to "refute" the idea "that our citywide council members' votes or perspectives are not potentially as valuable, or that our roles are in some way meaningfully different" than council members elected by district.
Solomon, who was appointed to the open District 2 seat in January after Tammy Morales resigned last year, suggested that it wouldn't be fair to require him to recuse himself from votes that would impact all other landlords in the city equally. Under current law, Solomon asked, "Is there an exception, because me, as a guy living in one half of duplex, is not going to benefit more than anybody else who's renting out a duplex?" (There is not).
Hollingsworth, who said she was seeking a middle ground between "extremes," proposed an amendment that would require recusal in some cases—specifically, whenever a council member's financial conflict would create "unique and direct gain or loss that is specific to the elected official but not other persons or entities regulated by the legislative matter."
It's unclear what kind of situation would ever meet this extraordinarily high standard, and council central staff director Ben Noble struggled to come up with hypothetical scenarios in which a single person—say, a flower shop owner who would be negatively impacted by a law requiring businesses to open at 9 instead of 7—would be impacted differently than other flower shop owners. In reality, council members rarely recuse themselves under the existing, broader requirements, so it seems reasonable to assume that Hollingsworth's amendment will rarely, if ever, be applied.
Council members who supported the law took pains to argue that by lowering the ethical standard from recusal to disclosure, they were not actually lowering the standard, something even Barnett—who strongly supports the changes—didn't claim.
"Councilmember Strauss has said on a number of occasions now that we're lowering the standard, and I want the record to reflect that we are not lowering the standard," Rivera said. "There are still standard rules here for ethics. We're making some clarifying amendments, and I really strongly thought that needed to be stated."
"We are not taking the guardrails off, we are making them better so that we as a council can work more effectively," Moore added.
Tellingly, none of the council members who support the rollback have taken credit for the changes in their newsletters or issued press releases touting the elimination of recusal requirements, and three of the five supporters abstained from the committee vote, allowing the literal record to reflect that they did not take any position on the proposal in committee. Only Solomon and Rivera, the council's two landlords, voted for the legislation.
Nelson, citing Rivera's commitment to attend an event honoring retiring University of Washington president Ana Mari Cauce, refused to allow Strauss and Rinck to make final comments on the proposal before the committee voted, telling Hollingsworth that she was "overstepping" by asking her to let Rinck—who had been raising her hand on Zoom for several minutes—say a few words before the vote.
After the committee voted, and everyone but Kettle and Hollingsworth had signed off the Zoom call, Rinck finally had a chance to speak against the proposal. Addressing the empty seats beside her, Rinck said, "I have three simple questions for every person who usually sits behind this dais: Why now, what comes next from this body, and how much of that will build off the backs of poor and working people? I understand the committee has already voted today, but when this comes before full council, I ask to please vote for the best interest of our community by voting no to end this legislation from moving forward. This is not good governance, and it's betrayal of public trust."
Before the vote, Moore noted that nothing is "set in stone," and that a future council could decide to reimpose the recusal requirements if they want. In reality, it's hard to think of a scenario in which the council would decide to impose stricter ethical standards on itself once the old standards are gone.
The current city council includes five members who've served less than two years, two who've served less than one year, and one, Solomon, who wasn't even elected. The two longest-serving tenured members are now in their second terms. This group, with less collective experience in office than any council in Seattle history, is about to eliminate a basic standard for ethical governance that has stood for decades. The consequences of their decision will persist long after they've left their current jobs.
They all need to be voted out. Ethics are a precursor to strong leadership. “Acknowledging” isn’t enough.
Another manifestation of the (predicted) self-Trumpification by pseudo-progressive Seattle.