(Image: Seattle City Council)
Mark Solomon has ten months to change Seattle. Monday, the Seattle City Council voted to appoint the longtime Seattle Police Department community crime prevention coordinator to finish the term of Tammy Morales representing the International District and South Seattle’s District 2 at City Hall.
Solomon has pledged to focus on the job at hand and says he will not run in the November election to re-fill the seat.
Solomon has said his priorities will be representing D2 neighborhoods in the city’s comprehensive plan update and address street disorder in Little Saigon.
Solomon’s appointment begins immediately and will last until November 2025 when voters will elect someone to serve the remainder of the position through 2027. Committee assignments will be confirmed in early February but Solomon is expected to pick up the land use responsibilities previously held by Morales.
Morales left office after unexpectedly announced her resignation over accusations of toxic work culture and politics under Council President Sara Nelson.
With land use at the center of City Hall debate in 2025, Solomon’s committee assignment will bear watching. District 3’s Joy Hollingsworth was chosen to chair the council’s select committee on the comp plan update.
Solomon has been vying for a seat on the council for year. He was a finalist in last year’s appointment process to fill a citywide seat on the council. The Seattle Times endorsed Solomon in his unsuccessful 2019 run for the D2 seat. Morales defeated Solomon in a landslide victory in 2019, garnering 60.5% of the vote.
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What a joke. Someone somehow worse than godawful Woo
Give him a chance!!
No, his district hates him
Evidence for this, please.
He lost his previous race by 21 points. They certainly don’t like or love him.
Seems odd to choose someone who the voters have already rejected
The representatives for D2 since moving to district elections have been Bruce Harrell, Kirsten Harris-Tally and Tammy Morales so its seems like a pretty low bar for Mark to succeed here.
Tammy was way better than all of them
He seems like a reasonable person that will work to represent D2 and toward solving the city’s intractable problems.
I am sure it is frustrating for the leftist ideologues that their limousine socialist leader threw a tantrum and headed back to her mansion on the lake once her pension vested rather than fulfill her term.
They should be nominating someone closer to Tammy’s ideals as they voted for that
and she bailed on them
They didn’t do that when Burgess left the council. They instead appointed Harris-Talley who was his polar opposite.
You mean like how the previous Council appointed Kirstin Talley Harris to fill Tim Burgess’s seat when he left Council to become interim Mayor? Talk about political whiplash. Sorry, what goes around comes around.
False equivalence. Talley Harris did not previously get rejected by voters and certainly did not run for the position afterwards like Woo did.
The incumbent council should get to elect someone that matches their values, after all the council represents the voters choices regardless of how unpopular they currently are.
In my opinion, it would be perfectly acceptable for the current council to choose the most pro-rich, pro-business, anti-Seattle candidate that they want. However putting in someone voters soundly rejected previously is poor ethics and just reflects the undemocratic views of the current council.
Don’t you think it’s odd that this council has a habit of appointing people who have lost the popular vote? First Woo and now Solomon.