The Seattle City Council confirmed 14 members of the city’s renter’s commission Tuesday, days after a dustup last week.
The appointment of volunteers to serve on any of the city’s many advisory commissions is generally pro forma and done with little fanfare or notice. But controversy over the renter’s commission appointments gave a peek into larger and more thorny debates in City Hall over the city’s landlord-tenant rules and whose voices are valued within halls of power.
The commission, established in 2017, has operated with just five members for the last year and a half — a third of the 15 it’s supposed to have. In the council’s housing committee last week, council members were scheduled to remedy that by voting on 14 nominations.
But two of the committee’s members, Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmember Rob Saka did not show up, meaning there was no quorum and councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Mark Solomon could not vote.
Nelson said she’d requested an excused absence the day before. Saka, who was in the building during the meeting, said he had a personal conflict.
Rinck, though, doubted the explanation, believing it was part of a larger desire to reshape the makeup of the commission to include landlords. Former Councilmember Cathy Moore, who recently resigned, had been working on such an idea and emailed Saka, Nelson and Solomon late the night before the scheduled meeting suggesting they delay the appointments.
Nelson said she never saw the email and Moore said she never heard back from the three. But Rinck, the only renter on the city council, still viewed the lack of quorum as intentional.
“It’s hard for me to read this as anything other than intentional suppression of representation, key representation,” she said last week.
Both she and Solomon apologized to the nominees who’d shown up to City Hall for wasting their time.
In the aftermath of the committee meeting, Nelson announced the council would instead take up the nominations in the council’s weekly meeting with all members, where legislation gets final approval.
