Less than five months into Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson's term, a fellow Democrat on the city council is publicly breaking ranks, telling the New York Times he is "gravely concerned" about the accelerating exodus of businesses and wealth from the city he serves.
Councilmember Rob Saka's admission is striking not because the underlying facts are new, but because of who is saying them. Saka enthusiastically welcomed Wilson after she defeated incumbent Bruce Harrell, praising the "energy she brings to leadership" and declaring that voters had called for "change and a renewed focus on affordability, community, and fighting back against a resurgent Trump agenda."
The change arrived. So did the consequences. And now Saka finds himself staring at a downtown losing corporate anchors, shuttering landmarks, and hemorrhaging the high-earning taxpayers that fund the progressive programs he championed. As Fox News Digital reported, the councilmember's two-word summary was blunt: "This is real."
The most visible blow came from the company most closely identified with Seattle. Starbucks announced it will shift 2,000 corporate jobs, primarily in IT and supply chain management, to a new regional headquarters in Nashville. The move pulls a major employment engine out of the city where the coffee giant was born and built.
That was not the end of it. KOMO News reported last week that Starbucks laid off an additional 61 employees at its Seattle corporate headquarters as part of a reorganization of its technology department. The New York Post noted the same pattern, a company simultaneously expanding in a lower-tax, business-friendlier state while cutting headcount in the city that raised it.
Wilson's response to Starbucks has been something other than diplomatic. Last year, at a barista picket line, she declared: "I am not buying Starbucks, and you should not either." Whatever message that sent to workers, it sent a different one to the C-suite.
The Starbucks migration is the headline. The Columbia Tower Club is the symbol. The private club, perched atop Seattle's tallest skyscraper, closed last month after more than four decades. It cited declining office traffic and downtown business activity tied to remote work and high vacancy rates.
When a city's most iconic rooftop gathering place shuts its doors because there aren't enough people left in the buildings below to keep the lights on, the problem is not theoretical. It is structural. And it is the kind of slow-motion collapse that tax increases and ribbon-cutting ceremonies cannot reverse.
Wilson, meanwhile, recently held an event promoting new downtown public restrooms, a priority that drew pointed commentary from the Washington State Republican Party, which posted on X that the mayor "is more concerned about toilet ribbon-cutting photo opps than massive capital flight in downtown #Seattle all the while @SeattleCouncil stands idle as a once iconic city crumbles."
The party's frustration is shared well beyond Republican circles. Commentator Brandi Kruse wrote: "Seattle's Socialist Mayor responds to exodus of wealth from Washington State by saying 'BYE'... then laughing. We're doomed."
The policy backdrop makes the business flight worse, not better. On March 30, Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson signed the so-called "millionaires tax", described as the state's first-ever income tax. The measure imposes a 9.9% income tax on households earning more than $1 million each year.
Washington had long been one of a handful of states with no income tax, a feature that attracted high earners, tech founders, and corporate headquarters. The new levy erases that advantage overnight. Critics argue it could accelerate exactly the kind of wealth flight Saka now says he fears.
Wilson's take on that risk went viral. She told an audience: "I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are super overblown." Then she added, with a laugh: "the ones that leave? Like, bye." The Washington State Republican Party called the clip one that "will live in infamy," adding that Wilson "is not only unfit to be mayor, she lacks grace and gratitude."
Ari Rastegar, CEO of Rastegar Capital, also criticized the mayor's dismissive stance on millionaires relocating. The reaction from the business community has been less a debate than a verdict, delivered not in press releases, but in moving trucks and forwarding addresses. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched progressive governance hollow out other blue-state strongholds in recent years.
Rob Saka's concern would carry more weight if it had arrived before the damage was already underway. After Wilson's election, Saka said he looked forward to "partnering with her to build a thriving, inclusive Seattle that uplifts working families, expands universal preschool for all, ends food deserts, and creates safer, more connected neighborhoods across our city."
Those are fine aspirations. But universal preschool costs money. Fighting food deserts costs money. Safer neighborhoods require funded police departments, the same Seattle Police Department that Wilson has directed to investigate, verify, and document reports of immigration enforcement activity, a priority that tells officers where the mayor's attention lies.
Every one of those programs depends on a tax base that is now actively shrinking. When 2,000 Starbucks jobs leave for Nashville, they take salaries, spending, property tax revenue, and the downstream economic activity that supports small businesses, restaurants, and service workers. When high earners flee a new 9.9% income tax, they take the very revenue that was supposed to fund the progressive wish list.
This is the core contradiction that progressive cities keep refusing to confront. You cannot simultaneously treat wealth creators as enemies and depend on their taxes to fund your agenda. You cannot tell millionaires "bye" and then wonder why the revenue projections come up short. The math does not care about your ideology.
Saka, to his credit, is at least willing to say so publicly. But his earlier enthusiasm for Wilson's brand of politics makes the admission less a profile in courage than a confession of miscalculation. He wanted "change." He got it. The change just didn't look the way the brochure promised. It is a pattern of Democratic dysfunction that keeps repeating in different cities and different races.
Fox News Digital reached out to both Saka and Wilson for additional comment. The silence itself speaks. Wilson has shown no indication she intends to change course. Her public posture, laughing off departures, boycotting the city's largest employer, prioritizing immigration enforcement oversight over economic recovery, suggests the ideological commitments come first and the fiscal consequences come second.
The open questions are serious. Will other major employers follow Starbucks to friendlier states? How much revenue will the millionaires tax actually collect once the millionaires it targets have relocated? What happens to downtown vacancy rates when the signature private club on the city's tallest building can't survive?
Seattle is not the first progressive city to discover that capital is mobile and patience is finite. San Francisco learned it. Portland learned it. The lesson never seems to travel north in time. Democrats elsewhere face their own reckonings, whether it's public remarks that spark bipartisan backlash or party leaders scrambling to contain damage from their own policies.
Saka's "gravely concerned" admission may be the first crack in Seattle's progressive consensus. But cracks don't rebuild downtowns. Policies do. And right now, the policies in place are doing exactly what anyone with a basic grasp of incentives predicted they would do: driving out the people who pay the bills.
The voters wanted change. The businesses heard them, and changed their address. Meanwhile, Democrats across the country continue to face the fallout of choices their leaders made and their voters endorsed.
You can laugh at departing millionaires, or you can govern a functioning city. Seattle is learning, the hard way, that you cannot do both.