After 18 Months Of Delays, City Council No-Shows Sabotage Renters' Commission Once Again

The City of Seattle doesn’t care about renters — or at least, Council Members Sara Nelson and Rob Saka didn’t care enough to show up to work for them.

Wednesday’s meeting of the City Council’s Housing and Human Services Committee was supposed to be a breakthrough: After more than a year of delays, the committee was finally set to fully seat the Seattle Renters’ Commission (SRC), which has operated with just 5 of its 15 members since early 2024. But in a last minute twist, Nelson and Saka ditched the meeting, leaving the committee without enough members to legally vote. Saka, reportedly, dropped out just five minutes before the meeting.

Council Members Mark Solomon and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who did attend, apologized to the appointment hopefuls and the public. But Rinck, the council’s lone renter in a city where more than half the population rents, didn’t mince words.

“It is council members' chartered responsibility to be at these meetings,” Rinck said. “This is literally our job. So I find it deeply frustrating that people took time to leave jobs in the middle of the day, yet not every member of this committee could show up to do theirs.”

And she didn’t seem to think the absence was just poor scheduling.

“It’s hard for me to read this as anything other than intentional suppression of representation, key representation,” she said.

Though Solomon officially called off the meeting, he allowed the attendees to speak. The appointees in waiting (some of whom have waited since November 2023) shared not just their interest in serving, but their frustration with what they described as a coordinated effort to weaken or ignore renter power in Seattle.

“...We are being systemically shut out of City Hall,” said SRC Co-chair Kate Rubin. “Which today feels like just such a perfect example of that — of how our voices really do not matter to those in power.”

The SRC has been sounding the alarm for over a year. Last June, they sent a letter to the Mayor’s Office demanding the release of $50,000 that had been allocated to their work during budget negotiations. Two months later, they wrote to the City Council urging the Housing and Human Services Committee to seat the full 15-member commission.

Some insiders believe former Councilmember Cathy Moore, who previously chaired the committee, deliberately stalled the appointments. Her goal? Allegedly to restructure the SRC to include landlords as part of her long-promised landlord wishlist. She never got to pull it off — renters booed her out of office before she could.

But the sabotage didn’t stop there. Emails obtained by The Burner show that, earlier this month, the Mayor’s Office attempted to install a landlord and a property manager to the Renters’ Commission.

On July 9, SRC Co-chairs flagged serious concerns about two of the Mayor’s proposed appointees, Bruce Fischer and Angela O’Brien. 

According to their cursory research, Fischer was unfit to represent renters. For example, Fischer talked about how he exploited the 2008 housing crash to turn a quick buck on low-income tenant properties on a podcast called “BiggerPockets” and he made comments on public social media pages against tenants unions. 

“We have concerns with the idea of Mr. Fischer ‘representing’ renters given his history of public comments centering property owners/managers and disparaging renters, particularly those of low incomes,” the co-chairs wrote. “His experience as a renter is secondary, rather than centered.”

O’Brien didn’t carry the same baggage, but the co-chairs still held reservations due to her long tenure as a property manager for the Seattle Housing Authority. After a short series of emails and a phone call, the Mayor’s Office backed off and agreed to swap Fischer out. SRC gave O'Brien their blessing.

But that course correction doesn’t erase the City’s pattern of undermining the SRC, a pattern that should concern anyone who rents in Seattle. There’s still no new date set to finalize appointments. Nelson and Saka have yet to publicly explain their absence. And the Renters’ Commission, meant to represent the city’s majority, remains unable to fully function.

Solomon promised in the failed meeting that the appointments will happen. For now, renters are still waiting — and watching — as City Hall delays, deflects, and disappears.