With three days left to vote by mail for Tuesday’s primary, tonight and Sunday morning we are wrapping up our close-up looks at candidates in races including the three Seattle City Council contests you’ll find on the primary ballot. Previous stories are in the WSB Politics archive.

By Jack Mayne
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

Jessie Israel is seeking to replace a Councilmember she once supported but now says has done more obstructing than supporting solutions to the city’s problems.

The 35-year-old Ballard resident is running for City Council Position 6 against incumbent Nick Licata and candidate Martin Kaplan. She has never been a candidate before but she is certainly not a political neophyte.

“I was co-chair of the Women’s Political Caucus for five or six years, so I have been following campaign politics for many years,” she says.

But why Licata, who has gotten more than 70 percent voter support in his last two races?

Israel says Licata is a person she has supported and voted for in the past, but despite his “indisputably great values,” she contends that the city needs Councilmembers who “actually know how to implement and move the ball forward and actually make progress on some real challenges our city is facing.” Licata has a track record, she says, of saying “no” to a lot of things, without finding a way to accomplish needed improvements.

“It is not enough any more to say that ‘I am asking the tough questions’ if you are not getting to the answers that our city needs to try,” she says. A Councilmember must be able to build coalitions and consensus to actually get something done, something Israel says Licata is not doing.

She notes estimates by the Puget Sound Regional Council, disputed by other experts, that almost 2 million people will be moving to the area in the next 20 years. Israel says now that Seattle has left unprecedented prosperity behind, decisions to preserve housing “affordability, to maintain open spaces and livability and to actually build transit” must be made but haven’t been.

“We have spent far too long in this city talking about what to do about the Viaduct, what to do about transit” and many other things, Israel says. She condemns it as a relic of the past “Seattle Way,” which is “process for the sake of process.”

“If we can’t come to 100 percent consensus then we have another commission, we talk about it some more … . I find that personally offensive that we, as a community, cannot make the decisions that are going to decide our livelihood and our children’s livelihoods,” she says.

Before taking a leave of absence, Israel was on the management team of the King County Parks Department. “My job was to figure out how to keep park sites open,” and she says the work kept thousands of acres of county parks open by getting levies approved and finding money from new, non-taxpayer sources.

She can use those skills on the City Council, she maintains, because a major part of the job is gaining and keeping the trust of voters, governments and the private sector. “That trust is critical,” she says. “I don’t see that is what Nick Licata has been doing for the past 12 years. …

“Some people say they like having somebody who says ‘no’ on the Council, but I think we need a fresh team on the Council that figures out how to get to ‘yes,’ who doesn’t just say no. …

“The Council has been going in nine different directions over the past decade … which has left a leadership void with the mayor has been able to take advantage of,” she says. “But, if you have a good reason to say no, then the job is to earn the votes to get people on your side.”

She insists she is the unifier she says Licata is not. “There are number of things I have learned over the years about my leadership style,” she says. “One, I have no need to grandstand. I do not need to be the center of attention. I am a better leader because I don’t have any ego involved with it. My job is to figure out where leveling is and to bring people together and to think out of the box
when necessary….”

She believes the biggest problem facing the city is the expected flood of new residents and the lack of a good transit system, adding that West Seattle is a prime area for transit concerns
.
Neighborhood planning is an important element of the city’s future, she says. “If you ask people’s earnest opinions and then ignore what they say, then you are going to slowly but certainly get people angrier and angrier about the direction we are going in. Our job is to come together and figure out how to deal with that growth to keep our city affordable.”

She believes the city will have no working-class residents if the affordable housing situation is not solved soon. “Our City Council sure as hell hasn’t been doing anything about it the last 12 years,” she says.

Her proposal for finding the way to affordable housing would be, not letting the housing market “go its own way.” Solutions include bringing down the cost of city permits for building housing and lowering the cost of the land use process by simplifying the fee structures, she says, and to allow builders to build higher structures, something she realizes will be a point of contention to residents.

“We can no longer be able to say no to density and no to heights – absolutely not,” Israel says. “If you are saying that, you are saying what you want is $1,300 a month for a studio apartment. We need a City Council that plans the debate and says (to residents), ‘Here are your options.”

She says she is in favor of passage of the housing levy that is on the November ballot this fall, noting there is no other way to build the affordable and transitional housing needed. Another big problem for housing, she says, is getting the necessary permits.

Work that can be done by an owner in a weekend sometimes is stalled six or more weeks by bureaucracy, Israel says. She believes the solution is to put more people who know how to process building permits into the city Department of Planning and Development. “We need to redeploy to city departments where they are needed to serve the citizens,” she says. “Building is good for our economy so we should get things moving.

“The answer should be ‘can do,’ not ‘no, it cannot be done.’”

Israel’s website is at jessieisrael.com. She and Nick Licata are the two candidates in the Position 4 race endorsed by West Seattle’s biggest political group, the 34th District Democrats. Our candidate reports continue through this morning; be sure to get your ballot into the mail or a drop box by 8 pm Tuesday. Find our archived coverage of all political races and issues here, newest to oldest.