Sara Nelson Promised Good Governance: Gave us Chaos and Ineptitude

When conservative politician Sara Nelson took over as President of the Seattle City Council, she promised “good’ governance.” At the time, I noted several omens that suggested otherwise. It turns out they were prophetic. 

Ryan Packer reports the latest installment in the never-ending Nelson drama. Nelson is apparently unhappy with her more moderate colleague Dan Strauss. So she unilaterally removed him from vice-chairing the committee that is working on Seattle’s comprehensive plan (our 20 year growth plan, mostly focused on housing), and apparently did this without even discussing it with him. 

So like all good governance, it broke out in a public spat. 

Strauss was the previous land use committee chair and has more land use expertise than anyone on the current council. Nelson replaced him with a brand new, temporary councilmember installed to fill the District 2 seat after Tammy Morales departure because of the toxicity of the workplace presided over by Sara Nelson. Now our twenty-year future will be shepherded by someone who started his job on January 27th and has never done anything like it. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that is “good governance.”

State Representative Julia Reed weighed in, asking “when will we have a Council President who is not a nonstop source of drama?”

When Nelson first made her comments about good governance, I suggested the signs were not fortuitous. These included:

• Her collusion with the (highly politicized) Seattle Times Editorial board which masquerades as a neutral arbiter. 

• Her dishonest claim that she rejected “ideologically driven” policy. Nelson was actively making ideological statements about how taxes impact the local economy, statements that ignore local economic reality and are directly at odds with rigorous economic research.

• Nelson’s comments about how spending was out of control because it had increased compared to inflation and population–when it had declined as a share of GDP. This suggests she doesn’t know even introductory public finance and economics. 

• When experts testified before the council about how to successfully address addiction, Nelson did not want to hear it. She was so committed to her (ineffective) right wing “abstinence-only” treatment ideals, that she put airpods in her ears during the hearing.

Since then, she’s gone on to

• Install a councilmember handpicked by a corporate lobbyist, after that lobbyist insisted that big corporations had the right to demand the council do this since they bought the election for most of the council members,

• Try to cut minimum wages for delivery drivers with a bill written by big corporations and when that failed, tried cut them for tipped workers 

• Waste tons of council time in passing unhelpful and largely performative “stay out of this area” zones

• Help Bruce Harrell defund affordable housing and light $100M on fire to only hire one cop

• Fight for less accountability for the council and for police

• egged on peaceful protestors and then had them arrested.

• Bully colleagues 

• Have her most craven lackey tried to defund affordable housing for people of color and then told those communities they just didn’t understand her bill. 

• Violate the city charter at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce by delaying social housing to the February special election

• Try to kill social housing’s corporate tax funding by confusing voters with an extra complex option that took money from affordable housing for the poor, and that Democratic party leaders have called “an assault on the party platform.”

• Help fundraise for a MAGA candidate 

• Engage in an openly corrupt sale of her business when the big corporate buyer had issues in front of the council.

When I first wrote about Nelson using the phrase, “good governance,” I borrowed this meme from one of my favorite cult classics. It turns out it was spot on: