Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 64 of 179)

The Thurston County political campaign kiss of death

October 12, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

What’s the best way to lose an election in Thurston County, even if you have more resources than your opponent?

Run over a dog during a parade? No.

Yell at someone when you’re out doorbelling? I’ve actually heard about this happening, and that person didn’t win, but still no.

Have an outside group spend tons of money on your campaign in what we call “independent spending.” The candidate in this case isn’t seeking this spending, but rather, a totally independent group, with no organization with the actual campaign, puts money into the game.

And, in the past few cycles, every candidate that has had money spent in their name without their control has lost.

Independent spending in county commissioner races first started in earnest in 2006 when about 58,000 was spent for Kevin O’Sullivan and $7,000 against him. In contrast, just about $3,000 was spent in favor of his successful opponent Bob Macleod. So, despite outspending Macleod $99,000 to $63,000 in campaign money overall, the extra independent money hung around his neck like a chain and brought him down.

We see the same thing happen in 2009 when just about $20,000 was spent in the name of Democrat Jon Halvorson, $7,000 for Republican Judy Wilson and $1,403 for Robin Edmondson. Each lost, with Halvorson with the most spent, when down first in the primary.

Also, in 2008, Cathy Wolfe (Wilson’s opponent) had $6,500 spent against her in independent spending. That money ended up kicking back at Wilson.

So, with a special sort of election between Pat Beehler and Karen Valenzuela for another county commission seat this year, how will independent spending impact his race?

Well, first, it might not. The amounts of independent spending have dropped through the floor. Typically, the more conservative candidate gets more independent money spent in their name, but Beehler has only seen $1,300 go out for him.

The other part is about $260 that has been spent for Valenzuela and against Beehler and Dan Venable (who lost in the primary). I’m assuming this is the same expenditure split between its targets.

If you go by total numbers, Beehler will go down. Or, the spending will have no impact and we’ll just see who wins on their own merits.

All that said, there probably isn’t a direct connection between independent spending and victory, but rather a convenient coexistence. In short, its much more likely that independent spending will go to a candidate that some people (like builders) really want to win, but who doesn’t really have what it takes. Or, is seen as needing to be propped up.

Thurston County chamber off track (more copied forum thoughts)

October 10, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Ahem. AHHH Hem!!!

Why are candidates for the Olympia City Council, appearing at a forum in sprawling Lacey at the Worthington Center sponsored by the Thurston County Chamber of Commerce? Do they really expect Olympia residents to attend?

The Thurston County Chamber still doesn’t understand that we have three separate cities in this county – – not just one.

Those wanting to hear the Olympia City Council candidates could have attend the recent meeting of the League of Women Voters which featured all of the candidates for the Olympia City Council. It was at the Olympia Center, which happens to be in Olympia.

Additional, non-copied snark: Actually, we have five cities and two towns in Thurston County. Do we expect the residents of Yelm, Bucoda, Rainier and Tenino to drive all the way up to Lacey or Olympia in the middle of the day? Or, at night?

Seriously, I think its ok for folks from Lacey to drive a few minutes into Olympia and vice versa, but we have to stop pretending this is a Lacey/Oly fight here.

Sermonti’s billboard and ugly politics in Olympia

October 10, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

City of Olympia by Dreamjung at flickr:

I’m technically violating the rules over at facebook by pointing this out, but someone tore down Tony Sermonti’s billboard Thursday night. From what the Sermonti posted up on his account last night, the police are investigating.

This is the latest in the trail of ugly politics in Olympia. Since 2004 I’ve heard stories from Republican and more conservative friends of mine of blatant and repeated vandalism across town. Several times, a friend of mine has had graffiti cleaned off his truck, replaced a George W. Bush sticker and ended up having a window broken out.

And, there are the things that happened to Jeff Kingsbury last year.

I’ll be blunt, I’m not going to vote for Tony Sermonti. But, the people who do this sort of thing are cowards and are the worst part of Olympia.

You Suck.

Which gets me to the point of a post that I’ve been meaning to write since I started noticed those “they can’t govern us” posters around town last February or so. The sentiment in those posters, the same that tore down Tony’s billboard this week, is the same that infects the so-called Tea Baggers.

When your government does things (moves to try to universalize health care or allow a tall building downtown), and you end up rejecting (you aren’t my government anymore) the validity of that government, you’re just running off into anarchy.

I’m not trying to use anarchy as a pejorative, but rather what I assume to be its true meaning, that universal government, for everyone by everyone, is not valid.

That may be a useful political point of view, and not one that I have a lot to argue about with, but when that philosophy starts to excuse violence, that’s when I have a problem. And, to be blunt again, we’ve allowed this sort of thing in Olympia for way to long. I don’t know how exactly we can go about stopping it, but we should.

Telford withdraws endorsement of Davis for Port

October 6, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Via email:

I made a mistake. This is to announce that I have rescinded my endorsement of Jeff Davis for the Port of Olympia Commission.

From the beginning I was uncomfortable with how independent Jeff could be as an active member of the Longshoremen’s Union.

He tried to provide assurance by promising to excuse himself from Port decisions that affected Longshoremen.

But it turns out that the bulk of his extraordinary collections of campaign donations are large contributions from outsiders and Longshore Unions. The final straw was his pompous response to this issue in a recent forum when he said, “If you were to go to the state PDC website and look up my contributors, they all have stevedore and ILWU names behind them and quite frankly, I’m fantastically proud of that. We stick together, we work together and we live and die together.”

This tells me that he is both emotionally and financially beholden to his Union colleagues.

It tells me that he will not be able to critically and objectively assess decisions affecting the port’s marine terminal.
His response is a reminder of the belligerence of some Union dockworkers, which is not the norm at the Port of Olympia.
It is clear that he will put their interests ahead of the citizens of Thurston County who he may be elected to serve.

Maybe I’m too idealistic but I strongly believe that it is not in our best interests to elect anyone who is both financially and emotionally beholden to outsiders or a particular special interest group. You can forget any altruism or notion of public service.

In fairness to Jeff , I have not demanded that he remove my name from his campaign materials as most have already been printed.

Given recent wake-up calls concerning stormwater management at the port, Dave Peeler’s background can be an asset to the port.

Both other Commissioners are fans of spending whatever it takes to keep the marine terminal going and largely indifferent to port taxes and spending, the port needs some balance.

I’m now suggesting that my friends to vote for Dave Peeler.

Paul Telford, (outgoing) Commissioner
Port of Olympia

Ken Balsley says firemen, cops abandoned posts during an earthquake, firemen shoot back

October 3, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

In this post outlining what he calls a new aristocracy (apparently making sure front line government workers don’t get sick during a pandemic is not a good thing) Ken makes this seemingly off-hand reference:

Government was unable to function because its employees had gone home – – fire fighters, police, emergency services, many had left their jobs to check on their families.

Wow, them’s fighting words. Took them awhile, but the Lacey fire fighters are fighting back:

Recently, a local publication reported that fire fighters abandoned their posts on that crisp February morning and so did many police officers. I am here to say having worked that day as a fire fighter and remembering it vividly, that none of that crap happened and I am left wondering if the intent was really to discredit us as cops, fire fighters, or emergency workers, or just to add interesting material to the publication. Who cares, bottom line: It never happened.

So, what is the point of discrediting government workers in general, but also firemen in particular? The union that represents Lacey firemen has been particularly engaged this election cycle, but I’m more willing to think that its just Ken being Ken and that he’s knocking any sort of government worker, not just firemen. In his world, its just believable that firemen would go home after an earthquake.

But, I’d also let the firemen speak for themselves:

When the Nisqually earthquake hit, our first order after we took cover and waited for the shaking to stop was to roll the apparatus out of our then aging masonry structures in case the aftershocks caused them to fail. As some areas had lost power, it took a few moments to get this done by manually opening doors at some stations. By the time the apparatus had been rolled out, the first off duty responders started coming in. Unlike many areas, many Lacey Fire District #3 employees live in their city of employment. Within 45 minutes, every single apparatus the department owned was staffed or being moved into position to offset response in areas of heavy call volume. This all went down as the City of Olympia had significant areas of road failures, elevator collapse downtown, and people stuck in elevators throughout the Capitol Campus. Lacey also had multiple gas leaks, a trailer fire in the Nisqually Valley and well over 100 calls by 3pm that day including treating sick and injured children from the local schools.

Off duty Lacey Fire District fire fighters, both volunteer and paid, came in as far away as Lewis and Pierce County to respond to calls. NO ONE abandoned their posts that day and to do so would have meant immediate termination with the union demanding it and definitely not defending it.

The big reason why Thurston County doesn’t have the website it needs

October 1, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

This could have been one long post, but I think three posts (here and here as well) is better.

So, the big reason for the lack of a decent (but lets not confuse that with uninformative) website is governance.

Like most Washington state counties that have not gone through the home rule process, Thurston County is a collection of independent elected officials from three county commissioners to a sheriff and an auditor and more. In the current way things work, each independent office has the job of maintaining their own website. So, what you get is a mishmash.

My understanding of how things are run right now is that a department under the commissioners, central services, provides general web support to most of the county. The independent offices, auditor, sheriff, and the rest, get some technical support, but tend to maintain their sites on their own. Most of the folks that develop and maintain the websites for the independent offices do so on a part time and ad hoc basis. And, when a person who then leaves the county who was maintaining of the sites, but didn’t have that job officially part of their job title, they take that experience away with them.

So, instead of a fully funded web administrator at the middle of all the offices, you have part time web managers throughout the county, each with their own ideas and levels of experience. That they the sites look different doesn’t matter to me, but the redundancy in duties and differing ways the sites are put together matters a lot.

I think the county would actually save money and be able to develop a better overall web presence if they rolled all the web functions into central services. Not saying that the folks in the independent offices who maintain the websites don’t work hard, just saying they work a bit too hard.

The website Seattle didn’t have (and Thurston County needs)

September 30, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Additional thoughts from my post below. From Capitol Hill Seattle:

But the weather wasn’t really the problem. The problem was information. Seattle was hit with a situation that required systems of communication and information distribution that it did not have. The city’s dying newspapers couldn’t keep up and City Hall’s various departments were too busy trying to dig out from underneath the snow and ice to turn to their antiquated systems of information distribution. They couldn’t connect information to the neighborhoods and streets where it was needed.

In emergencies, government agencies need to distribute information quickly. Very, very quickly. Radio stations are still king here and we’re lucky around here to have more than a few that can still get out information quickly because they’re run by people rather than computers.

But, the web is just as important. And, if you don’t have the turn on-a-dime-ability with your current government website, it will hurt you.

The website Thurston County doesn’t have

September 30, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Recently I was part of a group that met twice to discuss redesigning Thurston County’s currently horrible website. To put it shortly, the website is a reflection of a lack of technical progress (the pages are still manually built from an html editor) and the disjointed governance of the county.

The website being in the technical backwoods is less troubling to me because the website is actually very informative. The county’s technology manager attended our second meeting and said that getting everything possible on the website had been their first concern. To me, that puts them on good footing for where they need to go next.

And, despite the casual framing of the project as “redesigning” the county’s website, that is the last thing they need to do. Yes, its ugly right and it should be prettier, but not prettier in terms of a slick design. Drastically simple designs like craigslist.org’s or wikipedia’s would get the county where they need to go.

So, I wouldn’t call it a redesign, but rather a restructuring. The first step should be scrapping their current method of updating the website and implementing a Content Management System. Easier, open source solutions are available, but it sidesteps the concept of a “redesign,” which would seem to focus on the aesthetic and drive you toward the usable.

And, just one more thought:

I like RSS feeds a lot. If I could subscribe to a portion or an entire government website, that would be great. I’ve created some Pag2RSS feeds for some parts of the city of Olympia’s website (like city council agendas and planning commission), but an entire government website with RSS tied to it would be great.

Good old R. Scott, still not being able to read and such

September 29, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

R. Scott, chair of the local loyal minor party, is mad at Karen Valenzuela and a copy editor at the Olympian because he can’t read. He’s mad because he thinks the commissioner’s campaign used incorrect language in a fundraising notice to the Olympian.

In the top part of a notice in the Olympian (also in R. Scott’s own complaint in pdf here), not paid for or written by Commissioner Valenzuela’s campaign, the word “re-elect” is used.

Late in the same notice, the words “Valenzuela, an appointee…” are also used. Can R. Scott read? Does he care?

Sounders vs. Colorado back in June (soccer gameday report #2)

September 29, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

This summer I had a handful of equally unique soccer watching experiences. From Colorado to Bremerton, PDL, U.S. Open Cup and MLS, they made me think about soccer clubs. Like how they succeed, how they promote the sport and how they work as sporting organizations.

The first delibertaly written report (the first is actually here and here) is from our family trip to Colorado which included a nice trip up to Dicks Sporting Goods Stadium.

All of these posts will be organized under this category.

I’m not sure about formatting these posts, so I’ll just start with random, numbered observations.

1. Wow, Sounders fans travel. There were at least 20 organized Sounders fans who came to the game. In addition, I ran into at least a half dozen other folks from Washington coming to the game.

2. About sixty percent of the people I saw at the game were wearing some sort of soccer related gear, which seems low. About just less than half were wearing something Rapids related, and a good portion of those were wearing old style Rapids stuff. The rest were split between youth team jersies and jersies of worldwide clubs (Chivas of G, Barca, Manchester United, etc.).

I think it might have been a youth soccer night, so those jersey observations might be thrown of by that. But, it makes me think that Colorado suffers from the typical MLS problem in attracting fans. There are plenty of people that are involved in soccer (youth organizations or by following soccer worldwide), but have a hard time attracting them into following the local pro club.

3. Colorado had a very nice stadium, but it was in the middle of nowhere. There’s something to be said for having a soccer stadium near other stuff. Makes walking into the stadium a bit more meaningful. I don’t know, its just a feeling I have.

4. I understand there is an actual local connection to the term “Arsenal” for the Rapids, but the use of the UK’s Arsenal brand in the stadium, the firing of the cannon and the youth program is just ripping off the authentic British soccer experience, not trying to create your own. Just saying.