Cary Moon positions herself as a progressive urbanist and coalition builder. Her background is unique among the candidates running, having started her career as a systems engineer in the manufacturing sector. She then transitioned into a career focused on urban design and landscape architecture.
Cary is a thoughtful, highly intelligent candidate who has served city government agencies in planning. She is likely to engage productively with tech companies and employees in creating a better city for everyone. However, she is considerably less credible or skilled in political leadership than some of the others in this field of candidates.
Cary argues the city needs new revenue. She supports Seattle’s municipal income tax, a more progressive B&O tax on large companies, a state level capital gains tax, and exploring an inheritance tax. She did acknowledge that the city needs to transparently declare the current allocation of revenues to programs and services. Cary also acknowledged that the city isn’t the best platform for tax reform, although she did see a role for the city in spurring the state legislature into action.
Cary believes the city needs to increase construction of low income housing to prevent more homelessness and to help solve the current homeless crisis. She also pointed out that middle income residents are facing a housing crisis. She noted support for increased public transit (streetcar, buses, rail, etc.) and the need for our public transit infrastructure to catch up with population growth — including public education. She acknowledged the city had limited power to implement improvements in all of these areas.
Cary is a supporter of city-owned municipal broadband and is eager to develop policies that treat broadband as a public utility like water or sewer. However, it was clear she did not have a full grasp of the market dynamics, the economics, or the regulatory framework in this complex matter. She was quite eager to study the matter further and refine her point of view.
Cary is a thoughtful listener. Her engineering mindset was refreshing and came clear throughout the interview. She is, however, still forming a clear point of view on the rights, obligations, limits of power and jurisdiction of the city versus county and the state government functions. She is a quick study but there is much for her to learn in a very short time.
Cary has endorsements from The Urbanist and The Stranger.