The Meaning of Morales' Resignation

A Toxic Workplace

By now you have likely heard that Seattle’s longest serving progressive is resigning, after a year of 8-1 votes and a constant drumbeat of cruel and cringeworthy treatment from her colleagues.

Publicola broke the story this morning that Tammy Morales will be resigning in early January. Erica Barnett laid out a litany of reasons Morales has decided to move on. It’s not a pretty story, but it is one every person who votes in Seattle should read. And save it and read it again in a few months. And again when any of these people run for office.

Tammy is a strong progressive with a serious spine, and has been polarizing to some over the years. Some of my readers are rabid fans of Morales and some are equally rabid in their dislike of her or her politics—and I hear surprisingly frequently about this from both sets of you.

But the story I’m writing here isn’t about how you feel about Tammy’s politics or a council that hasn’t existed now for more than a year.

It is story about this moment and what is happening on our council now with these people.

And it is embarrassing.

I see three themes in the stories that suggest to me why Morales is moving on:

1. This council is a dysfunctional, ineffective body.
   
   The council majority has become something of a joke among reporters, city hall staffers, county leaders, and their staffers. It is similar with local government leaders all around the state, as well as many legislators. It’s now an open secret that many of the councilmembers still don’t understand how their roles work, how to interpret legislation, who to get on board if they want it passed, how to count votes effectively, or how to interface with agencies outside the city that have overlapping duties. The good part is that this means they have not been able to get very far on their conservative, anti-labor agenda. The bad news is that for anyone who goes into public service to accomplish stuff, this would be a maddening environment to work in.
   

2. The council’s treatment of Morales is characterized by petty vitriol.
   
   The Publicola piece covers this best but the short version involves multiple meanspirited and apparently totally false attacks from the dais (including an unwillingness to provide evidence to reporters to substantiate the attacks), middle-school style snark and condescension from colleagues that have been so far off base that councilmembers are even occasionally corrected by staff in public for getting things so wrong, refusing to engage on almost any area of shared ideas or overlap with Morales, refusing to engage on Morales’ conciliatory legislation, and voting for random budgetary earmarks for every councilmember and their district, except for Morales’. They are punishing District 2’s residents because they are so blinded by their hate for her and it is a genuinely ugly reflection on all of us. Given that both Rivera and Kettle were rebuked by the Democratic party publicly during their campaigns for campainging like Republicans, and Rivera had a history of bullying black and brown employees in the Arts department at the city, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, but I have found all of this to be egregious.
   

3. The balance of this council is conservative.
   
   While there are some moderates on the council, the balance of the agenda over the last year has been conservative in nature. The main agenda items have involved tossing out years of negotiating for accountability with the police and giving away all leverage with a huge retroactive raise, and then still going on to project that Seattle Police will, on balance, lose officers this year anyway. They’ve done far too little for the behavioral health crisis on our streets, cut affordable housing and oversight for labor violations, tried to cut construction money for housing, health clinics and childcare for marginalized communities, fought off any any sort of progressive taxes when we are one of the most regressively taxed jurisdictions in the country, and made multiple attempts to to attack the minimum wage. Also they may have violated first amendment rights in several instances.

You can imagine how Morales came to the conclusion. If you wanted to serve your city and push a progressive Democratic party agenda, would you think your time was well spent sitting alongside people who lie about you in public, metaphorically spit in your direction, accomplish very little, aim to make sure their few accomplishments are conservative when they do, and will go out of their way to make it so you cannot get anything done or be treated like a human being in public?