All right. Hell with this country, if it’s like that. All these years I’ve worked—and I never did want to be on all these committees and boards and charity drives!—and don’t they look silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak off to an ivory tower—or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory—and read everything I’ve been too busy to read.

Doremus Jessup in “It Can’t Happen Here,” a satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis published in 1935

In a gesture widely regarded by all sides as an impotent one, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan established a committee made up of representatives of the tech industry to

Harness the expertise of Seattle’s best technology organizations and brightest minds towards solving the challenges of our City, including addressing the affordability and homelessness crisis

Just what we need: another committee.

The collective eye roll at the creation of this committee wasn’t because it isn’t a good idea to ask smart people to help solve problems, but because the city has already asked smart people for their help a million times.

Remember one of the last big committees that was supposed to make recommendations about how to solve the housing “crisis,” the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee?

Of the dozens of recommendations made by the HALA Committee only one, the implementation of an illegal program of exactions from the production of new housing, Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ), is being implemented. The others, including a few that called for the City to make permitting for housing more efficient and coherent, have gone nowhere.

This Mayor needs help.

It is counterintuitive, but leadership requires an acknowledgment of ignorance. Power without knowledge is simply brute force. When someone with power admits that she knows nothing about something like housing and asks for help, that is leadership. A leader says, “I have the power and a mandate from the people to solve this problem and you have the knowledge of the problem. Tell me what you think I should do.”

At that point a leader sifts through the recommendations and finds those that align with her broader views about where she wants to take the city. Then she implements them by empowering people under her direction and then holds them accountable for achieving outcomes.

Unfortunately, like Donald Trump has, people in power often confuse signing a document or making an order or assembling a task force or committee as doing something. It isn’t. At best, asking a group of smart people to sit in a room and have a talking circle about an issue is a waste of their time – at worst it produces political documents that merely restate how bad the problem is and pine for politically unachievable solutions. These groups, for example, always end up saying things would be better if we only had a state income tax.

The City and the Mayor have already been told that the shelter system has too many barriers for people who need to access it and the entry system into shelters is uncoordinated. The City has been told, over and over again, that more rules and regulation strangle all housing production, including non-profit affordable housing. I could go on and on.

Pride devoured our last Mayor. Will it devour this one too? Perhaps. But Mayor Durkan can turn off her internal monologue which I am sure tells her she’s smart and politically savvy, and instead listen to people who actually know about housing, then use her power to actually help people.

The Mayor and Council couldn’t even execute the tax on jobs, a poorly conceived idea but one that had support. The City proposed it, realized it and they were unpopular, and then repealed it believing it was the lies and the money of the business community that duped voters to sign their names thousands of times.

This city is on the verge of either coming up with ways of coherently and efficiently addressing housing issues, doing something like MIZ that will make that problem worse, or simply standing around watching the problem become permanent and intractable. The Mayor is showing us that she favors the second and third options. It’s not to late to correct course.