Public hearings that lasted five hours. Days slammed with back-to-back events and meetings. Sleepless nights wrestling with homelessness solutions — even taking to the streets to spend the night in a tent outside City Hall. Kirsten Harris-Talley may not have anticipated any of this earlier this year before she considered serving on the Seattle City Council. But it’s now her lived experience, one that continues to stoke an interest in local politics.
“One of the things that was interesting were messages I would get from some folks that they had assumed, coming in an interim, I was supposed to be some facsimile of Tim Burgess,” Harris-Talley explains. But her relatively short tenure — arguably the shortest ever served on the council — was anything but a rubber stamp of Burgess.
Harris-Talley arrived to the council after the notorious chain of events forced the resignation of Mayor Ed Murray. Bruce Harrell became interim mayor but when he didn’t want the job, it went to Councilmember Tim Burgess. Suddenly, his Position 8 seat stood vacant. A total of 16 people applied to fill that position short-term.
On a Friday afternoon in early October, Harris-Talley won the council’s vote over former Councilmember Nick Licata and former City Council candidate Abel Pacheco. Her appointment came as a surprise to some who follow city politics and who assumed a more well-known politician would nab the appointment.
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