EVERETT — City Councilwoman Liz Vogeli has fought the good fight from the dais for seven years, but will step off council at the end of the year.
Vogeli shared her decision publicly at last week’s council meeting, and said she won’t retract her decision in an interview Saturday. She’s been contemplating not running for re-election for months, she said.
She plans to fulfill her term. “I’m not leaving the public eye, I’m just leaving council,” Vogeli said. “Now I might be louder.”
South Everett’s District 4 will see a new council member.
So far, one candidate has announced: Alan Rubio, whose platform is anti-crime and anti-tax. Vogeli doesn’t know him and also doesn’t want the seat to go unopposed.
“Somebody needs to step up,” Vogeli said.
Many good candidates living in District 4 are ineligible, Vogeli said, due to immigration status. Broadly, 1 in 10 people in Everett as a whole are not U.S. citizens, according to U.S. Census data.
Vogeli is not a politician by design. She ran on being a “fighter for the people,” said her campaign signs.
She’s also found herself casting the sole ‘no’ vote on topics favored by city administration, such as the council’s 2020 vote to increase the size of the police force, the 2021 authorization to let the mayor set “no-sit/no-lie” buffer zones that restrict homeless camping on sidewalks, rezoning the former Waits Motel for future redevelopment or most recently against approving Everett’s police drones program.
“I speak my mind and I tell the truth,” Vogeli said in an interview.
She thinks her stances attracted opponents for past re-election races in 2019 and 2021.
The people living in this council district, which includes Casino Road, make up Everett’s most racially diverse district, and it is considered one of its lowest-income districts as well as predominantly renter-occupied.
Her first go was a general election primary against appointed Councilwoman Ethel McNeal and challenger Tyler Rourke. Rourke and Vogeli advanced. “We both wanted it,” she said.
“When I first decided to run for City Council, it was way back in the first Trump Presidency, and I had joined various groups, started a neighborhood association that had been defunct,” which was her local Westmont-Holly neighborhood, “and heard the call that ‘local government is where change is made,’” Vogeli said.
