(soft music) (intense music) - Welcome to "The Newsfeed".

I'm Paris Jackson.

The Seattle City Council has a new face, voters backed Alexis Mercedes Rinck during November's special election.

She's the youngest person ever to hold a council seat, taking office as a balance of power in Seattle shifted a year ago.

I sat down with Alexis to hear how she plans to push her campaign promises forward while in the minority on the Council.

Welcome Alexis.

Thank you for joining us today on "The Newsfeed".

- Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

- You are joining the Seattle City Council at a time where you'll be in this position for about a year and if you decide you can then run again.

What do you hope to accomplish during this time?

- Certainly we are committed to advancing the policies that we put forward in the campaign's platform, so making sure that we're making movement on addressing the housing crisis and affordability, making sure that we're fighting for thriving wages and community safety.

- The city council has gone through a significant shift moving closer towards the center.

What do you think your election signifies?

- We ran a very clear platform talking about affordability, being very clear about our position related to progressive revenue.

I'm also mindful that I bring a real perspective to the council and bring some balance to the council in these discussions.

I'm a renter.

I'm someone who doesn't own a car and takes the bus to go to work and I'm someone who's a bit younger and I am, in many ways, a generational voice, a generation who's starting to wonder what place they have in the city.

- It's pretty clear you are going to be in the progressive minority.

How do you intend to focus your efforts given the voting numbers?

- Certainly, well, in a lot of my career experience, I've done work across the political spectrum.

Used to work with an organization known as the Sound Cities Association, and I truly mean it when I say I've worked with everybody from MAGA to Marxist and part of my job was bringing people together into a caucus.

So I might have had eight elected officials, each representing a different city, each having their own political ideology and bringing them together to talk through and try and coalesce around a policy position.

And I learned a lot in that process of what it means to really work with people, have hard conversations, put data on the table and go through that collaborative decision making process.

- During this particular race, public safety came up a lot.

Tell us a little bit more about where you see the city moving in terms of public safety and where it needs to move toward.

- I've been very clear in this race around the need to be building a public safety system that has quick responses and the right response.

We know that improving our first responder staffing across the board from even looking beyond law enforcement to looking at alternative behavioral health responders to looking at emergency medical and fire and building out those other kinds of responses will be really critical as well.

You know, I've been in 911 dispatch.

I've written along with the care team and also spending time ridealongs with our precincts with a personal goal to ride along with each precinct, again, to see firsthand how is our response system working.

People wanna see quick responses and people want to know somebody's gonna answer their call.

And we can also recognize that a law enforcement officer may not be the best person to respond to every given scenario.

- Thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate your taking the time to speak with us.

- Of course.

Thank you for having me.

(soft music) - If you're looking for a new cultural hub, take a trek to the Harbor Steps in downtown Seattle.

Open since September, the indigenous-owned space has showcased Native American art, storytelling, gallery goods in a boutique Northwest photographer Matika Wilbur spent the past decade traveling the nation documenting contemporary native communities.

You can view her collection of photography called "Project 562".

Now through January 5th.

I'm Paris Jackson.

Thank you for watching "The Newsfeed", your destination for nonprofit Northwest news go to CascadePBS.org for more great local coverage.

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