So Alison Holcomb, ACLU superstar and the force behind Washington’s legalized pot movement, will not be running for Seattle City Council. We learned this last week, when Holcomb announced that she’d been offered, and accepted, an even better gig—national director of the ACLU Campaign to End Mass Incarceration. Spurred by a $50 million grant from The Open Society Foundations, the ACLU, and Holcomb, will now work to “reform state-level criminal justice policies that have increased incarceration rates dramatically during a period of declining crime and have exacerbated racial disparities,” according to a press release issued by the ACLU last week.

In an email to supporters, Holcomb said the job was just too good to pass up. “I hope you understand that I simply cannot resist this challenge,” she wrote.

As Seattle Weekly’s Ellis Conklin reported back in July, Holcomb was “seriously considering” a run for City Council in the 3rd District, in large part because she was unimpressed with the way current council member—and likely 3rd District candidate in 2015—Kshama Sawant, handled the minimum wage fight earlier this year. “You don’t effect change without a broad coalition, and her rhetoric is all about ‘you are a capitalist pig,’ no matter what the size of your business,” Holcomb told Conklin, referring to the avowed socialist.

While we now know it won’t be her, Holcomb still believes someone should challenge Sawant.

In an email to Seattle Weekly over the weekend, Holcomb confirmed that—up until getting the surprise job offer—she was “99-percent set on running for Council. I still had a few conversations I wanted to have before declaring, but barring something unexpected, I planned to announce just after the holidays,” Holcomb says.

Has time softened her take on Sawant’s work on the Council? Not so much …

“Sawant clearly has an agenda, and I respect that, but I don’t think it’s a councilmember’s agenda,” Holcomb explains. “It remains to be seen what she can accomplish for Seattle, and the constituents of District 3, between now and November 2015.

“In the meantime, yes, I think someone should run against her.”

It just won’t be her. And it’s a decision Holcomb seems at peace with. “We’re going to stop the insane over-criminalization of Americans and bring mass incarceration to an end,” Holcomb says of her new job. “Everyone’s ready.”