Seattle City Council District 2 candidates talk taxes, housing, and public safety

The Seattle City Council District 2 seat was vacated earlier this year by former Councilmember Tammy Morales. It has been temporarily filled by interim Councilmember Mark Solomon, but he plans to step aside once voters decide which candidate they want to represent their community — Adonis Ducksworth or Eddie Lin.

Soundside’s Libby Denkmann hosted the two candidates for a debate at the KUOW studios about who will join City Council representing the southeast Seattle district that includes the Chinatown-International District through Rainier Beach.

Ducksworth is the communications and policy advisor at the Seattle Department of Transportation.

Lin is an assistant attorney for the Seattle City Attorney's Office.

Gun violence and crime center cameras

Ducksworth: Gun violence disproportionately impacts people of color. In the south end, we make up about 13% of the city's population, but we account for over a third of the gun violence in the city, and a lot of that has to do with poverty, years of disinvestment and trauma, and those things are not just going to be undone overnight, and they're not going to be undone with a camera.

We need to start with stability in the home, with education, with health. What the research tells us is that when a person finds out that they're going to have a child, that's when we need to start the work, right? It's not so much about where the mother comes from or where the mother is going, but making sure that they have stable housing, health care, and employment. If we invest in our youth, in our prenatal care, 0 to 5, we're going to see dividends and returns, especially when it comes to things like public safety.

Lin: We both oppose the expansion of [camera] surveillance. We have to be aware of what's going on at the federal level, right? We have some protections for our surveillance data, but we've also seen those protections fail at the state level, where the feds have gotten a hold of our Department of Licensing data, and they're going after health data. And so right now is not the time [for] surveillance. It can be an investigatory tool, but it doesn't prevent crime.

We need to be investing in the community. We need to be investing in gun buyback programs and gun lock storage programs and getting our youth connected with apprenticeships and good jobs.

Public safety spending

Lin: We need to be investing in basic needs like housing, health care, and mental health. We need to expand our CARE team, so that is where we send out social workers and mental health care providers when there's a 911 call, and we need to update the contract with the Police Officers Guild so that they [the CARE team] can go out on their own, so they don't have to be accompanied by a police officer. We need to hire more police, more women, more diverse police officers who come from our communities, who understand our diverse cultures and languages. And we need real accountability. I've experienced misconduct by police officers myself, and it's traumatizing. There's a lack of trust between many in our community and the police and that results in a lack of public safety.

To build that trust we really need to lean into civilian oversight when there's a misconduct allegation instead of having sergeants do those investigations.

We absolutely need more mental health care providers, because that allows our police to respond to our most urgent public safety needs if they're not responding to those mental health calls.

Ducksworth: It's an interesting and complex topic when we start talking about the police, and about people that look like me, people of color. I wholeheartedly agree that if we are going to hire more police officers, if we're going to invest in our police force, those officers have to be accountable, they have to be representative, and they have to be able to form relationships for the community. And if they can't do any of those things, they don't deserve to be a police officer in the city of Seattle.

Substance use disorder and treatment

Ducksworth: My dad was an Airborne Ranger and when he got out of the military, he struggled with substance abuse, and he ended up living on the street and ultimately died from his alcoholism. I’ve had my own struggles with it and I've been sober for 10 years.

When a person is in the throes of addiction, when a person is actively using drugs, they're not thinking about much other than finding more drugs. When we're talking about opium or opioids, we're talking about people who if they don't do these, if they don't get another fix, they will get sick, and that makes it hard for them to stop.

What we need to do is make sure that we get them the medicine, quality treatment, and shelter that they need for when they're ready to stop.

Lin: It’s also impacting my family, I lost an older brother to alcoholism. A lot of our social services are not funded at the level that they need to be. People might try a shelter, but maybe they were offered a congregate shelter where they weren't allowed to have their pet or a partner there, and so that was a traumatizing experience. Or they might go to a treatment facility, but it might not be well suited to their needs, and so people get traumatized from not having individualized services. We need to tailor our services to meet people's needs.

Homelessness and encampment sweeps

Ducksworth: I don't think [sweeps are] an effective way of dealing with homelessness. We can see it moving farther south, so they're still homeless. We definitely need quality services and shelter. We also need to think about what we're doing upstream to keep people from going into homelessness. We need to make sure that we're providing housing at all the different levels, so that for folks who maybe can't afford market rate, there's affordable housing, because we need to stop the stream of people moving into homelessness as well as dealing with the folks who are on the street.

Lin: I do not think [sweeps have been effective]. We can all see that. When there's a large sweep downtown, it gets moved to Little Saigon. When there's one in Little Saigon or SoDo, it gets pushed down to Beacon Hill. So it's not a large encampment, but small encampments everywhere, and that's not addressing the root cause of the issue. When you just push people around, they lose their belongings and medication, and it just gets even harder for them to trust the government.

We need to build shelter, provide treatment, and work with programs. I did a tour of [the nonprofit organization] Purpose.Dignity.Action. They have a site off of Aurora Avenue, and they do deep, individualized care for folks. They get them housed and do after-care for up to 12 months. If you can do it once, if you can do it right, we're going to see better results on our investments. Right now, we're spending so much pushing people around, spreading the investment so thin that we're not actually solving the problem.

Seattle Comprehensive Plan and housing growth

Ducksworth: More housing in more places. I can't say that there's one specific neighborhood that should take on more housing. That comes from the zoning. In 2026, we will have that opportunity to zone for density all over the city. It's not just on the arterials, but throughout the neighborhood residential as well.

We also need to make sure that we've got the right funding in place to help those who want to build affordable housing and make sure that we are streamlining our permitting, so that [for] folks who want to build affordable housing, it is an easy and smooth process for them to do it.

What a lot of our affordable housing providers who are building right now tell us is that that is a big barrier right there. To solve that, we need to make sure that our Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections is staffed up with the right people, and we look at new and innovative and creative ways to speed up our permitting process.

Lin: For many years, we had single-family zoning. We don't have that anymore, we have neighborhood residential. But for many years, large parts of our city were basically locked off from multifamily [homes] and rental housing, and these are high opportunity areas where there's plenty of tree canopy and parks and you're on the waterfront. We need to make sure that there are housing opportunities throughout the city, that we aren't again repeating those mistakes of the past. We are a deeply segregated city because of those prior decisions that were segregated based on home ownership versus renter versus class and race due to historical racial covenants.

We need to do everything we can to have a more integrated city, not putting all of the multifamily housing on arterials, but making sure that we are planning around schools and transit.

The Jumpstart tax and proposed taxes

Ducksworth: I'm not totally convinced that jobs are moving to other places only because of the [Jumpstart] tax. There's probably a whole host of reasons why a business may decide that they don't want to do business in Seattle. It could be a combination of taxes, public safety, not finding the right workers in that location.

While I do support and believe that the wealthy should pay their fair share, we also need to make sure we're putting money back in the pockets of the people who need it most. There's a number of ways to do that. There was a really great pilot in King County, where we saw guaranteed basic income for the folks who needed it the most and [it] actually brought people a step up out of poverty.

Lin: Many of the wealthiest in our country just got one of the largest tax cuts in history from the federal Trump tax cut and we're going to see the cuts locally to Medicaid and Medicare and SNAP. So we absolutely need to fix our upside-down tax code. Currently, our lowest-income folks pay about 14% of their income in taxes through sales taxes and property taxes. The wealthy pay about 3.5%, and that's immoral and it's bad public policy. We're never going to meet the needs of our community unless we address our tax code.

The Jumpstart payroll tax has been a huge benefit to the city, and that is a tax on the high earners of the largest companies, and it's basically prevented massive cuts to our budget over the past four or five years. So we absolutely need to defend that Jumpstart payroll tax. We can increase the rates at any time that we have enough votes on council to do so. I'm not convinced that that's the reason that they [Amazon] shifted jobs over to the East Side. There could be many different reasons.

I would love to support a capital gains tax. You need to be mindful there, so you're not incentivizing companies or people to move. But I think we need it, and we should pass it.

Using Jumpstart money to fill gaps

Ducksworth: I've worked in the city, in the mayor's office, on policy, on budgets. While you're trying to figure out how we are going to keep employees and services, there's this Jumpstart reserve of cash, and so we're going to move this cash over here to plug this hole — it's almost like taking out a loan against yourself. When would you pay that back and without a real plan to do that? This is bad policy. A plan is a plan, and we stick to the plan. We stick to what the legislation is. Because when we don't do that, that's when people lose faith in local government.

Lin: It should stay with the original purposes of affordable housing, the Green New Deal, equitable development initiative. Those continue to be top priorities.

If you're just paying for everything under the sun, it's a lot harder to tailor the city's overall budget to that fluctuating revenue amount. It's hard when you know you tell the public you're passing this new tax with these specific purposes, and then you switch it up. [I] don't support raiding it again.

Pedestrian and driver safety

Lin: We [in District 2] have some of the most dangerous roads anywhere in the city. I've learned a lot of this from listening to Adonis in all these different debates. There's design, enforcement, and education.

Design should be the first tool that we should be using to correct. We should raise crosswalks and other ways to get people to slow down. I have concerns about cameras again, especially at this time because of the data security issues. I think enforcement should be the last tool that we go towards. I think that gets people to slow down, but we've also seen disproportionate impacts from racial profiling and so I have concerns about using the police to get people to slow down, so design would be the preferred method.

Ducksworth: As somebody who has spent their whole professional career in transportation, it means a lot to have these conversations about transportation. I also have a 15-year-old who's learning to drive. She's really anxious to drive and, as a parent, it's really scary to think about her driving around South Seattle.

You have your education, engineering, and enforcement. Eddie [Lin] had talked about those things. As a council member, I think we can get out of the Department of Transportation’s way to do the work that they know works to keep people safe on the roads. They're the professionals, the engineers, the ones who've traveled all over the world and have great examples of what works. Unfortunately, what happens is a lot of folks like to get in there and say, well, you should be doing this here, and you should be doing that there.

The other thing that needs to happen too is we have funding. We have a transportation levy that passed, and the Seattle Transportation or the Seattle Transit measure will be up for renewal in 2027. We need to make sure that we are prioritizing strong leadership on council to prioritize those funds to do the safety improvements that are needed in South Seattle.

Lightning-round questions

Who’s your choice for mayor?

Ducksworth: Undecided.

Lin: Katie Wilson.

Light rail or street car?

Ducksworth: Light rail

Lin: Light rail

Where would you take out-of-town visitors in District 2?

Ducksworth: Jefferson Skate Park

Lin: Lake Washington