Meet Olympia City Council candidate Sarah Destasio
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of interviews with candidates running for Olympia City Council. At the end of each interview, The Olympian asked every candidate two questions: what they pay in rent or mortgage, and if they could correctly state the median home sale price in Olympia, which is $430,000.
Olympia City Council candidate Sarah Destasio is a former co-chair of the Olympia chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed her along with fellow candidate Talauna Reed. Destasio is a co-founder of Capital Homecare Cooperative, a worker-owned caregiving agency.
Destasio is running for Olympia City Council Position 6 being vacated by Renata Rollins. Corey Gauny and Dontae Payne also are seeking the seat, so there will be an Aug. 3 primary to winnow the field.
In an interview with The Olympian, Destasio said that supporting workers and worker-owned businesses are a central focus for her. She cited ideas like a city minimum wage and “predictive scheduling” rules, which she said were first proposed by council member Jim Cooper more than five years ago but failed to pass.
Destasio declares on her website that “housing is a human right,” and wants stronger protections for renters, including requiring just cause for evictions (which recently passed on the state level), creating a registry of landlords, and advocating for state legislature to legalize rent control.
Other housing goals include increasing revenue for affordable housing and ultimately moving toward more housing under public ownership — including through land trusts, public housing, and co-ops.
Destasio is one of two candidates (the other is Reed) that supports linkage fees, which are similar to impact fees, but for affordable housing, or other mandatory housing affordability policies.
She said she would end tax exemptions for developers of market-rate housing, including the 8- and 12-year Multifamily Tax Exemption.
Destasio, who refers to herself as an abolitionist, said that while she believes “reasonable and sustainable” cuts to the Olympia Police Department budget should be made now, the larger project of undoing policing could take generations.
“When we’re talking about reducing the police force, we need to think of those officers as workers who need job retraining and job placement if their current roles are going away,” she said.
She supports defunding the police, and believes the idea is misunderstood. It doesn’t mean a loss of public safety, she said.
While catalyzed by racial justice protests over the past year, the defund movement has failed to take hold with Olympia’s current council, which has embraced reforming the police but largely rejected defunding them. Destasio said the feedback she’s gotten boils down to: “Overall the community doesn’t understand what defunding is, and is kind of scared by the idea.”
One solution she proposes is to move things like the Crisis Response Unit (CRU), which she said is “a good model and doing great work,” out from under OPD. Right now, the CRU, and the cost to pay its employees, is part of OPD’s budget.
She also supports a fund for victims of hate crimes and police violence, an idea that she credits to Reed.
How much do you pay in rent/mortgage?
Destasio owns her home outright, which she credits to being the recipient of “intergenerational wealth.”
What’s the median home price in Olympia?
“I think I just saw that it was $430,000?”
This story was originally published May 24, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
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