After two rounds of voting, the city appointed veteran city hall bureaucrat John Okamoto to serve out the remainder of recently resigned council member Sally Clark's term.

Council members Tim Burgess, Sally Bagshaw, Jean Godden, Bruce Harrell, and Tom Rasmussen voted for Okamoto, who was most recently the interim human services director—giving him the five-vote majority he needed.

Burgess, Bagshaw, Godden, and Rasmussen had voted for Okamoto on the first round—while Harrell, who ended up providing the Ohio vote, went for Urban League analyst Sheley Secrest in the first round.

The council's left wing—Nick Licata, Mike O'Brien, and Kshama Sawant—eventually united around labor and civil rights vet Sharon Maeda on the second round after first going for Maeda (O'Brien) and Low Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee (Licata and Sawant) in the first round.

"It would be scandalous,
 for example, if any council member today voted [for] John Okamoto."
 —Kshama Sawant

Sawant trashed Okamoto during her testimony—she said if the council voted for him, it would either be a "comedy or a tragedy" providing a victory for the "establishment" and "status quo." She called him "procorporate" and "prodeveloper." 

And she concluded: "We do not need another politician who is all too willing to continue the status quo of corporate politics. We do not need another loyal representative to Seattle's elite political establishment. It would be scandalous, for example, if any council member today voted [for] John Okamoto." 

Her most tangible criticism of Okamoto actually came during Friday's Q&A when she asked him why there had been a $40,000 surplus at the Human Services Department when there is a need on the streets for those dollars. During today's vote she cited Okamoto's time at the Port of Seattle, which she referred to as a "cesspool of corruption when he was the chief administrative officer."

Council members Harrell (indirectly) and Rasmussen (by name) criticized Sawant for attacking Okamoto, accusing her of an "odious smear campaign," before reading off a list of lefties, such as El Centro de la Raza's Estela Ortega, who he claimed supported Okamoto. Would Ortega, Rasmussen asked, support someone who was in the pocket of big business?

During a press conference after he won the spot, Okamoto called Sawant's comments "disappointing." He also defended his time at the Port of Seattle as chief administrative officer between 2003 and 2008—when Port CEO Mic Dinsmore's sweetheart salary deal was standard operating procedure at a cloaked bureaucracy that eventually was found guilty of fraud in a U.S. attorney investigation. Okamoto simply passed around an email exchange with Rasmussen—who had asked Okamoto about the Port baggage—saying there were "no adverse findings referencing me" with a link to the state audit of the Port.

I asked Okamoto, who's taking over Clark's housing committee, if he supported rent control—a hot topic on the housing affordability agenda right now. He said, "I have to learn more about rent control and the unintended consequences of any of the other tools"—a reference to Mike O'Brien's linkage fee idea to charge developers per square foot to build new projects. He said the council needed to find more "funding streams" for affordable housing, but didn't provide any suggestions, saying he was looking forward to hearing mayor Ed Murray's task force recommendations.

Citing his parents' incarceration in a U.S. concentration camp in WWII (Okamoto is Japanese American), he said the appointment "felt like a dream."

Okamoto's resume includes stints as a city department director in the '90s (human resources and engineering), the chief administrative officer at the Port, and the head of the Teacher's Union, the Washington Education Association, from 2008 to 2014.

Two ironies: During Sawant's pitch for Maeda, she simply cited Maeda's history working in the labor movement (Maeda worked for UFCW Local 21). What? Is the WEA chopped liver?

Second, Godden, the council's feminist, voted for Okamoto, one of just three male finalists, over any of the five women, including Maeda—to replace Sally Clark.