Tensions between some members of Seattle City Council spill into public view
April 7, 2025 at 6:00 am Updated April 7, 2025 at 6:00 am
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Seattle Council President Sara Nelson’s leadership as council president has… (Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times)More **
By
Seattle Times staff reporter
Late last year, Port of Seattle Commissioner Fred Felleman attended an annual Chamber of Commerce ball for elected officials. There, he ran into Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson. She told him that she would introduce a bill the following week to allow housing near Seattle’s two stadiums.
He was taken aback.
The Port had long opposed new housing in the city’s industrial district and had just two years earlier threatened to blow up a larger land-use agreement over the very proposal Nelson was reviving.
“It’s not like you could not foresee the contention, given what has transpired in the past,” Felleman said. “To give us such little notice is, I think, a tremendous source of disrespect.”
Nelson won her vote, 6-3, to the delight of those advocating for housing and business in the city’s stadium district. But she also kicked a political hornet’s nest, not just riling the Port, but bringing tensions between her and some council members to the surface. It was reflective of Nelson’s political reputation since the beginning of 2024 — which she has endorsed — when she graduated from the lonely moderate on a progressive council to the leader of the backlash: She’s not always there to be liked.
“I’m fine if people disagree with my policy positions but I’m not going to shy away from taking on the powerful institutions that want to preserve the status quo,” she said. “Because it’s not working, in so many ways, for the majority of our constituents.”
Perhaps no member of City Council has engendered such strong feelings as Nelson. Those most strongly opposed to the progressive councils of recent history see Nelson’s rise as an ideological balm, someone willing to go on offense on their behalf. At the same time, even ideological allies have occasionally chafed at the council process under her.
The relationship between Nelson and Councilmember Dan Strauss, the two most senior members, has been stretched to the breaking point, with public and awkward fights playing out on the dais and Strauss needling Nelson’s leadership at every turn.
Newly elected Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck charged Nelson with putting her thumb on council operations for her political benefit. Even political ally Councilmember Bob Kettle spoke of his disagreement with how she used the administrative process to advance her housing bill.
The common thread among her most vocal opponents — or even frustrated allies — is they’re on the opposite side of an issue as Nelson. And what angers them is what gives her backers life.
“I think in a lot of ways, she demonstrates the conviction of a (former council member) Kshama Sawant, with the practicality and pragmatism that voters want to see around the issues they care about,” said Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association, who detested Sawant’s Trotskyite politics and is one of Nelson’s strongest backers. It was he who first said Nelson was not there to be liked.
When the current council members took office in early 2024, they arrived as a slate and were viewed as politically aligned — public safety-forward, skeptical of the progressive actions of previous councils. Nelson would be the head of that new body, a job she was eager to receive.
The reality has been more nuanced. Although the council has mostly moved together on law enforcement and public safety, it’s splintered elsewhere.
Proposals to rewrite wage laws for small businesses and app-based delivery drivers were dropped after lengthy processes for lack of support among council members.
A bill to enact a local capital gains tax — part of the progressive wish list — fell short, but only by one vote.
“This council is fairly fragmented,” said Sandeep Kaushik, a political consultant and lobbyist who pushed for the Sodo housing bill and for the unsuccessful rewrite of the app-based delivery driver law. “If you start to understand that there’s not a six-vote moderate majority, some of the things that Sara Nelson has done as council president are much better understood in that context and against that backdrop.”
Immediately before and after the Sodo vote, some members of the council took to openly questioning Nelson’s use of her position’s administrative powers. Frustration with the council president is typical but rarely aired so publicly as it has been recently.
In an interview, Strauss said he believes Nelson is using her position as president in a way that’s “incongruous” with presidents of the past — tipping the scale of the normally administrative business of committee management to influence the council’s direction. He pointed specifically to his removal from a key committee considering the city’s long-term housing strategy and his struggle to schedule meetings to talk about the city’s budget.
“I’ve seen decision-making that is affecting the health of the institution,” Strauss said.
Nelson has pushed back on his characterizations — which have increased in volume as he suffered a loss opposing the Sodo bill — saying it’s a normal shuffling as new members join the council. Although he denies it, some in the legislative branch have questioned whether Strauss is gunning for Nelson’s job.
But other members have also taken to publicly criticizing how the council has run.
Mercedes Rinck said she’s worked with other legislative bodies and has concluded the operations of Seattle’s council are an outlier. She said it’s been a struggle for her to get Nelson to commit to scheduling committee meetings so the council can consider how it should respond to new federal policies.
“It seems as though to me that some of the proscribed powers of council president are being misused for political purposes,” she said.
Even Kettle, one of Nelson’s closest political allies, publicly disagreed with how she used her authority to send her controversial housing bill through her own committee rather than the one regulating land use. He said they’ve worked well together on many issues, but “it is a path that I wish she had not chosen, and it’s a path that doesn’t allow for a deliberative approach.”
Nelson has taken a more forward posture than some previous presidents, who’ve done less legislating in favor of the administrative side of the job, but disputes that she’s politicized the office.
“Policy differences and procedural debates are a normal part of any legislative body,” she said in a statement. “My role as President is to support Councilmembers’ individual legislative success while fostering an environment of mutual respect — and my door is always open in service of that end.”
Councilmember Rob Saka said he believes most of the public tensions playing out publicly are the result of typical “legislative sausage making.” He has good and communicative relationships with his colleagues, he said, and believes council operations are being conducted appropriately.
“I always wish that we had these more sensitive conversations, where we’re talking about the leadership and motives of each other, behind the scenes,” he said. “But we’re all separately elected.”
Councilmember Maritza Rivera, too, praised Nelson because she “brings people from across the city to solve the city’s toughest problems.”
“Sara has absorbed a lot of these attacks and in response to them has not always worked to try to bring her opponents along on the issues that she’s championed,” said Kaushik.
Nelson is up for reelection this year. Already, an opponent, Dionne Foster, is arguing she’d be better at respecting “people’s rights and voices.”
Scholes, at the Downtown Seattle Association, said he doesn’t think the election will change how she operates. “It’d be easy as the council president to sort of coast the remainder of the year, into your August primary, November election, and not make any waves,” he said. “But she wants to get things done.”
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