Watch: Tanya Woo and Alexis Mercedes Rinck face off in Seattle City Council debate
Watch live as Seattle City Council Position 8 candidates Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Tanya Woo face off in a debate.
Woo was appointed to the citywide Council seat in January, filling a vacancy left by former Seattle City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, who was elected to the King County Council.
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Woo, a small business owner and activist in the Chinatown-International District (CID), made a name for herself running a community watch group focused on public safety. She also led a successful effort in 2022 to kill the expansion of a homeless shelter in the CID and surrounding neighborhoods.
Those experiences prompted Woo to run for Council last year, with a focus on public safety. She tried unsuccessfully to unseat progressive South Seattle incumbent Tammy Morales, narrowly losing that race by roughly 400 votes, or 1.5%.
Almost as soon as she lost, Woo’s supporters in the CID and South Seattle started to float her name as a replacement for the open seat, in some cases noting that she would be the only Asian-American voice on the current Council.
Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Woo's challenger, previously worked at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, where she helped develop the agency's five-year plan.
Compared to Woo's experience, particularly as an activist in the Chinatown-International District, Rinck said "it's a matter of scale" — where Woo has made inroads in the CID neighborhood, Rinck said she has done that work across the Seattle area.
Rinck said she will focus her campaign on three key areas: growing and diversifying the city's investments in affordable housing, while protecting renters and supporting BIPOC communities; supporting worker protections, in part by ensuring the Office of Labor Standards is resourced and perhaps expanded; and evaluating community safety solutions, particularly with regard to the opioid overdose epidemic.
Katie Campbell and David Hyde contributed reporting to this story.
