Standing in front of a packed room in the lobby of City Hall around 11 a.m. this morning, Mayor Katie Wilson asked the crowd: “Is anyone here at Seattle City Hall for the very first time this morning?” At least a dozen hands shot up and a few people shouted yes. 

“Welcome,” she said. “This is your building, and I'm going to need you to come back here again and again and again.”

Continuing her first speech in office, Wilson delivered a clear message that, as mayor, she planned to be the same exact person who’s been working in those halls since she co-founded the Transit Riders Union in 2011. 

The address was, at its core, anticapitalist. “I want to live in a city that honors what you're doing when you're not making money,” she said, “like the time that you spend with your kid at the playground or caring for a sick friend. I want to live in a city that celebrates the labor that people perform voluntarily…. A city that values the pursuits that create beauty and community, whether or not they ever turn into careers. A city that thinks that you should have time to read a book and lay on the grass staring up at the clouds. Because we need bread, but we need roses too.”

The speakers before her swearing in represented the many parts of her work before she ran for office. Ifrah “Iffy” Abshir, a Somali-American health services researcher, worked with Wilson when Abshir was a sophomore at Rainier Beach High School fighting for free buses. Jarvis Capucion is an organizer for Nickelsville who worked with Wilson on protections for homeless people. And John Burbank, the founder of the Economic Opportunity Institute, has been reimagining a more affordable Seattle with Wilson in the months before she co-founded the Transit Riders Union. All of them talked about her good character, her doggedness as an organizer, and the change in City Hall that she represented.

Cynthia Anne Green, an eight-decade Seattle resident and the mother of Stranger contributor Marcus Harrison Green, noted Wilson’s consistency. “She didn't just organize for change when it was fashionable,” Green said. “She showed up when it was hard, that's the difference.” 

“The path ahead will be hard,” Green continued. “You will be celebrated, and then you will be scrutinized. Your work and actions will be looked over, you will be lifted up and then torn back down. This is the pattern. And when those days come and they will come, I want you to remember this: You are not alone. You have assembled a team that reflects the true Seattle, multiracial, multi generational, rooted in community, rich and lived wisdom, people who understand that loudness is not clarity, that ego is not leadership, that passion is not weakness.”

Fresh off a heated, negative campaign, Wilson is familiar with criticism. And while she nodded to her shout out from Trump (“I had the honor of being noticed by the President of the United States, who called me a very, very liberal slash communist mayor. It's nice to feel seen”), she spent much of her speech addressing concerns from the near half of the city who didn’t vote for her—especially the handwringing from moderates convinced that City Hall was about to be overrun by purple-haired leftists. 

 Wilson didn’t deny that the building would see a lot more progressives than recent administrations. But she made clear that progressive bonafides weren’t a free ticket into the mayor’s office. Her hiring process comes down to “character,” she said. “Someone might share my vision and my worldview. They might be competent and experienced and effective, but if they're not in this work for the right reasons, if they don't have enough self awareness to reflect on their own motivations and rise above themselves when needed, then that's not a person that I should put in a position of power.” 

She acknowledged that she’s not someone who’s experienced in wielding positional power. “I've spent my career organizing with the people who often get left out of official narratives,” she said. But as mayor, she has to represent institutional power as well. “I had a little bit of a crisis of conscience,” she told the crowd. “Can I do that? Can I be the mayor of the waterfront and the World Cup and the stadiums in the Seattle Center and the Convention Center and any other centers we might decide to build?” 

“Well, I have some good news for our city: Yes, yes, I can,” she said. But “I'll do it in my own way.”