Amazon declined to answer questions about the specifics of its negotiations. A spokesman referred me to a comment by Drew Herdener, an Amazon vice president. “Today’s vote by the Seattle City Council to repeal the tax on job creation is the right decision for the region’s economic prosperity,” the statement said. “We are deeply committed to being part of the solution to end homelessness in Seattle and will continue to invest in local nonprofits like Mary’s Place and FareStart that are making a difference on this important issue.” (Amazon is building a permanent shelter for Mary’s Place, a Seattle nonprofit, within one of its new office buildings, that it hopes to complete by 2020 and that will house 200 people at a time.)

After Amazon halted construction, the council still moved forward on a deal. Amazon continued to negotiate behind the scenes with the mayor’s office and council members, according to Mosqueda. Council members had started off wanting to levy a tax of $500 an employee, but later backed down to $275, after which Amazon signaled to the mayor’s office that the company would not fight the tax, according to Mosqueda, who was a part of the negotiations. But immediately after the council passed the head tax bill in mid May, Amazon gave $25,000 to No Tax On Jobs, a committee created explicitly to put a referendum on the ballot to repeal the head tax. “Frankly, Amazon signaled they were OK with it, and within 48 hours, reneged on that,” Mosqueda told me. “I will absolutely have conversations with any business that wants to come to the table, but it cannot be hollow handshakes like we saw from Amazon.” No Tax On Jobs also received $25,000 each from Starbucks, Kroger, Albertson’s, and Vulcan, the privately owned company founded by Microsoft’s Paul Allen.

The fighting intensified. Community members and business owners started volunteering with the No Tax On Jobs campaign, which Wilson says was paying people per signature they gathered for repeal. Unions and progressive groups started “decline to sign” campaign urging people not to sign the petitions. The paid signature gatherers started getting into yelling matches with the volunteers who they thought were hampering their efforts. On multiple occasions, police were called. “Tempers really flared,” Wilson, of the Transit Riders, told me. Both sides accused the others of spreading misinformation—progressive groups said signature gatherers were telling people that the head tax would be taken out of employees’ paychecks and that small businesses were affected by the head tax, for example. Businesses said their employees were feeling so targeted and hated by progressives that they did not want to say in public who employed them.

O’Brien, the council member, told me the increasing vitriol was making him uncomfortable about continuing to support the head tax. “I feared that we would spend six months fighting each other,” he said. Voters were coming up to him and telling him that though they wanted the city to come up with new resources to fight homelessness, they didn’t think the head tax was the right way to go. When someone wearing a Bernie Sanders shirt told him that, he began to reconsider, he said. “If I’ve lost this person, I’ve lost the heart of Seattle,” he told me. Referendums are rare in Seattle, O’Brien said, and the fact that the opposition had gathered enough signatures gave him pause. That usually only happens “when folks think there is something that the council did that is way out of line,” he said.