Tanya Woo's Misleading Mailer

False Advertising From The Conservative Council Candidate

Why Not Just Tell Voters the Truth?

I received an expensive looking mailer yesterday from the Woo campaign, and I was disappointed to see it was full of misleading statements. While I have not been a fan of Woo’s surprisingly conservative beliefs, I hadn’t pegged her as downright deceitful. 

At first I thought it must be from a PAC, but it appears to come directly from her campaign.

In any case, today I was reminded that in her last campaign, she lied about her voting record. Woo said she had voted for Tammy Morales, when in fact she had not voted at all. And of course she knew she was lying because she had barely ever voted in a local election in her 30 years of eligibility. 

This is not the kind of person we need in office right now.

Vote for Alexis Mercedes Rinck instead.

(The Relevant Section of the Woo Mailer)

Woo’s entire “priorities” page was pretty much a head-fake. Here are the four false or misleading statements she made:

“Tanya Woo believes that Seattle’s leadership should keep their progressive promises”

While it’s not entirely clear what that means, it is clearly meant to signal she is a progressive. But recall that during Woo’s audition for appointment to the council, she had to answer questions. This was done alongside the other candidates who had made it into the later round and were picked to do so by the “centrist” council. Woo proved the most conservative. She outright rejected any form of progressive taxation to help with the massive hole in our city budget.

That is a rejection of Democratic party policy at its core, and it is the equivalent of a middle finger to the progressive part of the party. There is simply no defensible case to be made for embracing more regressive taxes than Herman Cain did in his Republican Presidential Run and calling yourself a progressive.

Woo has also been stumping for Andrea Suarez’ run for office. Suarez is a headliner at Republican events, and actively collaborates with and promotes insurrectionist candidates and thought-leaders. She is too conservative for even the Seattle Times Editorial board to endorse. But not for Woo.

Recall that Woo made anti-trans remarks on Hacks and Wonks last year. This year, when her campaign manager this year was asked about it, he is reported to have said “Why should I care about trans kids?” Woo hasn’t seem interested in addressing his callous response.

Unsurprisingly, the famously conservative Realtors PAC just dropped $60,000 into the race on Woo’s behalf. 

“Tanya will work to reform SPD while fully funding emergency responders–including crisis response teams.”

Ms. Woo was given a large, once-in-many years opportunity to “work to reform SPD” and she rejected it. The opportunity came earlier this year in contract bargaining with the Seattle Police Officers Guild. That contract is the reason we have such a problem with police accountability, despite an ordinance on the books that requires it. Because the city contracts away its right to hold rogue officers accountable, the guild can overrule firings for some of the most egregious reasons–it may even find a way to reverse the (excellent) decisive action from the new interim Police Chief. 

This leaves us with one of the worst behaved departments in the country.

Everyone understands that the only way to fix that is by addressing it in the contract. But we just had a huge contract update, where Tanya voted for a contract that rejected any real reform. But she and the council did give a huge raise to the police, making them the highest paid in the state.

Whether or not there are good reasons to ensure competitive pay, anyone who knows anything about bargaining understands that the council threw all its leverage out the window.

This was a decision by Tanya Woo and much of the council to not reform SPD.

Also, given Woo’s history of opposition to new progressive revenue, she clearly also plans to cut a quarter billion dollars in basic services from our city budget. Since the city already does so little to fund crisis response, it is extremely unlikely that she will be fully funding anything, especially crisis response teams.

“Tanya is pushing to expand effective city-level approaches, including behavioral health counselors, addiction specialists, and supportive housing.”

Where has Tanya pushed for more funding for much of anything, including supportive housing, or addiction specialists, or behavioral health counselors?

She is pretty much hard-charging for cuts.

Does she just mean she is trying to move money that runs from the city through the regional authority back to just straight-up-from-the-city services? Fine, but feigning that changing who signs the contract with outside providers is “expansion” is super sketchy.

The massive cuts coming are made much worse by her hardcore conservative stance against tax increases. As Kevin Schofeld detailed, even if we eliminated every one of the 35 small departments at the city, the ones funding arts, economic development, building inspections, labor standards, early learning and K-12 supports, and the like–we’d do irreparable harm to the city and still not cover the budget hole.

Schofield showed this means we’re going to have to cut things from the big seven departments, like transportation, police, libraries, finance & admin, human services, fire, and parks, plus the items funded by JumpStart, which is mostly affordable housing and childcare. But some of these come with statutory mandates that mean we cannot cut them (parks), they are practically infeasible (finance & admin includes jail services, legal payouts required of the city, and HR, including employee pension obligations), or they are politically untouchable (police, fire, transportation, libraries).

If anything, Tanya’s political commitments means massive cuts to human services and affordable housing, because that’s pretty much all that is left.

“Seattle Urgently Needs More Housing.”

While that is a true and lovely sentiment, Woo has advocated for down-zones, has failed to publicly push Mayor Harrell to do much to improve his  “I give up on housing” long term plan, and she has already voted against cutting red tape for affordable housing providers and did not vote for the social housing developer either.

Vote for Alexis Mercedes Rinck.