Erica C. Barnett
Seattle-based reporter, founder/editor of PubliCola.com, and author of Quitter: A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery
She/her, Latina, Texan
- Flippity-flip! This former duplex near me, which last sold for $975,000, has been transformed from two 980-square-foot apartments with a total of 3 bedrooms into a 5-bedroom, 3.5-bath single-family house they're offering for $2.4 million. WE NEED TO ALLOW APARTMENTS EVERYWHERE.
- Tired: Forcing property owners to retain private trees in their yards. Wired: Requiring property owners who reduce the amount of available housing to replace each housing unit they remove.
- ICYMI: Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi Files Bar Complaint Against City Attorney Ann Davison and Her Former Criminal Chief publicola.com/2025/05/08/m...
- This is what I keep coming back to. There is no constituency for weakening council ethics rules other than council members themselves. The public does not feel disenfranchised (and of course they used unspecified marginalized people as a shield) when elected officials can't vote due to conflicts.
- Sometimes the lack of self awareness for the #Seattle city council is so astounding. Like yes weakening the ethics code at a time of unprecedented political corruption in order to benefit certain special interests is uh, gonna cause folks to get a little heated. 🤷🏾♀️
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- "It seems like everything we talk about in Seattle these days is heated and controversial," Moore observes—after proposing what would obviously be a controversial proposal to roll back rules that try to prevent council members from self dealing.
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- It's discouraging to me, as someone who believes in ethical requirements and is also well aware that they are not applied consistently, that this group of mostly brand-new (and potentially one-term) councilmembers is going to dismantle a basic ethical requirement that has applied for decades.
- Kshama Sawant has taken over council chambers after Council President Sara Nelson called a recess because people were chanting.
- I'm sitting in an unusually crowded meeting of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, which commissioner Kristin Hawes just said had an "unprecedented" amount of public comment—all of it against changes to the ethics code that would remove recusal reqiurements for councilmembers with conflicts
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- "yeah, we have to be aware of what's happening at a federal level. But in some ways, the greatest way to continue to have trust in local government is for local government to be effective, for local government to be able to actually solve problems," Moore said.
