Accomplishments and Priorities
Accomplishments
2022 Accomplishments
2021 Accomplishments
2020 Accomplishments
2019 Accomplishments
2018 Accomplishments
Priorities
Committees
- Chair: Finance & Housing
- Vice Chair: Land Use & Neighborhoods
- Vice Chair: Select Committee on Labor
- Member: Governance & Education
- Member: Public Assets & Native Communities
- Member: Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies & Investments
Housing
Councilmember Mosqueda’s commitment to working families includes ensuring all workers have fair access to affordable housing. This includes her support and collaboration with community and colleagues on the Mandatory Housing Affordability legislation, the Accessory Dwelling Unit legislation, and efforts to maximize production and preservation of permanently affordable housing. In her first six months, she led on legislation placing a moratorium on the use of rental bidding platforms to bid rents in Seattle, pending review of their intersections with our Fair Housing laws, and allowing the Office of Housing to procure properties to future affordable housing development, ensuring we can be nimble in the current market.
Councilmember Mosqueda is committed to creating more workforce housing – for workers across the income spectrum – and determined to increase affordable housing options for our low and middle income families in Seattle.
Health
Councilmember Mosqueda remains committed to maintaining affordable health coverage for our City’s residents. She has been engaging in conversation with key stakeholders who can help protect access to a full range of reproductive care services, access to care for low-income and immigrant communities, and maintaining critical services for our LGBTQ community. She continues to drive harm-reduction public health policy solutions to help address the opioid and addition crisis far too many Seattle families are dealing with. Additionally, Councilmember Mosqueda understands that our current homelessness crisis is a public health emergency. By partnering with community health clinics and public health centers, as well as local private providers she plans on maintaining and expanding access to care and increasing access to mental health and substance abuse treatment services for all in our community.
Councilmember Mosqueda knows that in order to be healthy, families need both health insurance and housing and economic stability and is thus approaching all issues through a health lens.
Energy
Councilmember Mosqueda believes we must meet our energy and environmental conservation goals, ensuring our city remains a healthy place for generations to come. Arm-in-arm with advocates for green buildings, she advanced legislation that allows greater flexibility in contracts for green energy with City Light, and implementation of Energy Efficiency as a Service to more building retrofits in Seattle, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving energy efficiency for tenants.
Councilmember Mosqueda is advancing policies to ensure good living wage jobs are created in the green energy economy, promoting fiscally sound policies and oversight so that the public utility can continue to be solvent, and listening to community and industry experts about what we can do better in our rapidly growing city.
Workers’ Rights
Councilmember Mosqueda brings a decade of experience working with labor unions and working families to City Council. As an elected, Councilmember Mosqueda is focusing on highlighting the needs of our most vulnerable working communities, including women, people of color, immigrants, people with disabilities and the LGBTQ community. In council, Councilmember Mosqueda is focusing on expanding labor standards and protections to workers historically left out, ensuring that we continue to lead the nation on labor policies that promote unions and middle class jobs, and improving education and enforcement to help level the playing field for good employers who are trying to do the right thing by their workers.
In her first six months, she has passed legislation to codify the ban on the use of sub-minimum wages for people with disabilities, leading Seattle to be the first city in the nation to eliminate the use of a sub-minimum wage for people with disabilities. Councilmember Mosqueda is leading the effort to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that makes sure that those who care for our kids, parents and homes, are cared for. She crafted legislation that brought hiring entities and domestic workers together to craft new protections and create a first of its kind Domestic Worker Standards Board, creating an ongoing dialogue and vehicle for policy change between domestic workers and people who hire domestic workers.
Councilmember Mosqueda knows that we all do better when workers do better – we see improved health outcomes, greater productivity, greater economic stability and shared prosperity. She will continue to be a champion for working families, union values and small businesses.
Other
Councilmember Mosqueda serves a board member of the Association of Washington Cities and sits on the City’s Small Business Advisory Council as well as the Citywide Anti-Harassment Inter-Departmental Team (“IDT”).
Her work on the IDT is informed by her lived experiences and the experiences of many of her family members and friends. Sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and intimidation are experienced at high rates among immigrants, workers of color and women. Councilmember Mosqueda is working to ensure the City takes a strong stand against sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace and that the City’s policies create more accountability and transparency.
In her role at the City, Councilmember Mosqueda led efforts to include funding in the City’s education levy for a childcare mentorship program, helping to ensure that we have affordable childcare options for our families while maintaining and expanding a skilled, well-trained and diverse workforce.
Let’s Make Policy Together!
Have ideas on how we make policy change in the City? Click here to submit your suggestions or stay up to date on our work, or email me at Teresa.Mosqueda@seattle.gov.