Today Council member Mike O’Brien announced that he will not be seeking re-election in this year’s 6th District Council election.
O’Brien joins three of his colleauges, Council members Harrell, Johnson, and Bagshaw in deciding to hang it up at the end of this year. The other three district-based Council members, Herbold, Sawant, and Juarez, have announced their re-election campaigns. The two city-wide Council positions, currently held by Council members Mosqueda and Gonzalez, are not up for election this year.
Five candidates have already filed to run for the District 6 position. In total, 40 people are running for City Council across all seven positions up for election this year.
This afternoon, Mayor Jenny Durkan released a statement praising O’Brien.
curious if the author of this blog ever went back to watch video of the now somewhat infamous “North Seattle Town Hall” that took place in Ballard last year:
https://www.facebook.com/KOMONews/videos/1822065634528427/
KUOW dubbed it “The day Seattle Nice died” and I believe C is for Crank called it “2 Hours of Hate”…
I was at that meeting – and wow… it indeed did feel like a crazy/important moment in Seattle history – where everyone realized that the City had grown up, and people were going to start paying more attention to SCC politics…
as I’m sure ECB can attest – the energy in that room was *off the charts* and palpable in a way that is not even close to being represented in the that FB recording from KOMO…
nonetheles, the public commentary was pretty interesting – and former CM Harris-Talley gets a lot of credit for diffusing the situation that night
to me it clearly showed that CM O’Brien had let D6 constituent engagement lapse to a point that things had simply boiled over… and relationships were perhaps irreparable on both sides
it’s unfortuante to have seen many in D6 (and beyond) focus their energy on character attacks of CM O’Brien, rather than leadership and policy disagreements… hopefully this election cycle has a more positive spin, and can focus more on policy specifics rather than candidate attacks
and what’s the saying? ‘the devil’ you know vs. ‘the devil’ you dont? 😉
Yes, I watched it.
I am not optimistic about the quality of discourse we will be having in this year’s elections. I hear a lot of anger and frustration but not a lot of good, productive ideas for how to solve the city’s issues. But I would love to be wrong about that.