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Mike O’Brien is the Fourth City Council Member Who Won’t Run for Re-election

Politics

Mike O’Brien is the Fourth City Council Member Who Won’t Run for Re-election

As a convention, more Seattle City Council members are leaving public space than seeking re-election.

Councilmember Mike O’Brien announced Wednesday that he would not run again. He will be choosing to leave City Hall of his own accord rather than attempt to retain his seat in District 6, which covers Fremont, Ballard, Green Lake, and Phinney Ridge.

It should be reported here that O’Brien is the fourth incumbent to opt out of the 2019 council elections, after Rob Johnson, Sally Bagshaw, and Bruce Harrell, setting Seattle politics on course for enormous upheaval. All these seven out of nine-member council’s district seats are up for grabs.

The other three incumbents, Lisa Herbold, Kshama Sawant, and Debora Juarez — have launched campaigns. Citywide seats held by M. Lorena González and Teresa Mosqueda are not next up for election until 2021.

O’Brien while speaking to reporters Wednesday in his council office, said, he could have won another contest and agonized about whether to try. But his polling showed the District 6 race would not be easy, with the 51-year-old’s stances on issues such as homeless camping and housing density having made him, at times, a polarizing figure.

“Any elected official position is not a lifetime appointment,” O’Brien said Wednesday, adding that he hopes his absence will lend the race and Seattle politics more broadly a less divisive tenor. “This is the time to step back and allow new leadership to come to the fore.”

He was first elected in 2009 when all council members represented the entire city, O’Brien was a Sierra Club activist who worked for a decade as the chief financial officer for a local law firm. In his initial days, the bike-riding politician teamed up with a like-minded mayor, Mike McGinn, to oppose the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel that opened this month.

The lawmaker has always considered environmental, housing, safe-streets, labor and social-justice activists among his supporters, often aligning with other members on the left wing of the council, such as Sawant and now-retired Councilmember Nick Licata.

In 2015, O’Brien moved on a cycle across Elliott Bay with other so-called kayaktivists to protest the arrival of a Shell Oil drilling rig, and he backed Seattle’s groundbreaking $15-per-hour minimum-wage law.

Flanked Wednesday by admirers from social-service organizations, the Fremont resident spoke of pushing developers to pay fees for affordable housing and passing a law, since blocked in court, to help Uber and Lyft drivers unionize.

As per O’Brien, a desire to address climate change led over time to work against the city’s growing economic inequality. Jill Mangaliman, executive director at the environmental-justice organization Got Green, said O’Brien has gone to bat for people of color facing displacement.

“We’re going to lose a champion,” Mangaliman said.

But his term was not without controversies. His constituents were unhappy with his priorities and unsatisfied with his response to nuts-and-bolts problems in his district. Over recent years, the once-chipper council member’s trademark grin has regularly been replaced by a worried frown.

He also had been criticized for pressing to ease restrictions on homeless camping and backyard cottages in single-family neighborhoods and to adopt an employee head tax on high-grossing businesses to combat homelessness. They have also resisted his advocacy for the construction of a missing link between sections of the Burke-Gilman Trail in Ballard’s industrial area.

There was also rage against him when he defended the head tax at a neighborhood meeting, and he was shoved out of a party celebrating Ballard’s new Nordic Museum by the event’s shipyard hosts.

O’Brien acknowledged those sentiments, then added, “I don’t know what I could have done differently.”

“There are a lot of people that are scared and sort of frustrated, and that shows up as fear and hate sometimes in a way that’s kind of ugly,” he said. “I wish we weren’t so divided right now as a community.”

O’Brien’s announcement came the day after Dr. Jay Fathi launched a District 6 campaign with an endorsement from Tim Burgess, a former council member, and interim mayor.

As of now, Kate Martin and Jon Lisbin also are running in District 6, but after OBrien’s decision, more candidates are expected to be added. Dan Strauss, an aide to Bagshaw, announced a bid Wednesday, with Bagshaw’s support.

O’Brien also said moving away from the competition makes him nervous because District 6 needs someone who shares his values.

With O’Brien’s decision, it guarantees the council of next year will not have anyone elected earlier than 2013.

Mary Morgan

Mary Morgan holds a double degree in Journalism and Mass Communication and had experienced with various occupations such as news writer, content editor, reporter, technical analysis and a lot more. But she is passionate for news editing. From last 2 years, she regularly curates news articles for us in a different niche.

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