Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 77 of 176)

My questions for the applicants (and Russ Lehman’s response)

December 29, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I emailed a couple of questions to four applicants for the open county commission seat I’m considering right now (Russ Lehman, Karen Valenzula, Jeff Dickison and Walt Jorgenson).

They were about the possibility of home rule and how they feel about the county’s frightfully bad website and about blogging as an elected (or appointed in this case) official.

Russ Lehman got back to me pretty quick:

1) Yes, the home rule process, as I understand it, can yield some important results – not the least of which is an important discussion on issues facing this county in the 21st century. I do believe that serious discussion, at least, ought to occur about a BOCC with “reduced” powers and an administration with “increased” powers – better to enable the citizen’s work to be done efficiently and effectively. The fear of a wide open, no holds barred home rule process should not limit our desire and willingness to have the people of this county talk about, and possibility make the appropriate changes on, the critical issues facing us.

2) The website is not currently the tool/mechanism for nurturing Democracy and engaging and informing our citizens that it must be. Of course I would have that be a priority (a relatively small and simple task in the grand scheme of things) with an individual(s) tasked with bringing the website up to date and user friendly ASAP.

As regards blogging, I have mixed feelings about it. To the extent that it is a technologically current way to correspond with constituents, than great. To the extent that becomes a way around the OPMA by in any way “doing business” outside the public domain than I am not in favor of it.

His response on blogging, especially citing the Open Public Meetings Act is interesting, if not troubling. Some response from other elected officials on why they haven’t pursued blogging includes fear of violating the OPMA. In my short research, its the second most cited response to “what, don’t you think I’m busy enough?”

I’m going to have to start thinking harder and longer about the OMPA and blogging.

Jim Lazar’s list of who gave to who (open county commish seat)

December 28, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Ken has the scoop on local good guy Jim Lazar’s list of which county commission applicants gave to which candidates since 2000. Some gave to some non-Democrats, which might not look good to the party faithful who will do the whittling down:

Erik Landaas

Kevin J. O’Sullivan $300 6/5/2006

Kevin J. O’Sullivan $50 7/30/2006

Corinne Tobeck

Gary Alexander $100 5/28/2005

Sam S. Reed $50 11/8/2007

Ed Crawford

Norman K Maleng 4/25/2002 $100

Susan Bogni

Sam S. Reed $25 4/2/2008

The folks who get hurt the most by this are Tobeck and Landaas. Tobeck because she’s basically only given to Republicans until this year when she gave $10 to the county party. Landaas because two years ago he gave to the Republican candidate (twice) who ran against Bob Macleod, who Landaas is now seeking to replace.

It takes a certain amount of guts, I have to admit, to give $350 to Republican Kevin O’Sullivan in 2006 and then in 2008, as a Democrat, file to replace the guy that beat O’Sullivan.

Rich Nafiziger, state Democratic senate caucus chief of staff and blog father

December 24, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

To me, there’s a striking resemblance between former Olympia school board member Richard Nafziger’s on-again-off-again blog and the new blog of the state Senate Democrats (mostly penned by majority leader Lisa Brown).

Makes a lot of sense for Nafziger to be Brown’s blog father, but the similar blogging styles almost makes you think that its Brown’s chief of staff that’s doing the blogging. Both write long (almost too long) and really smart discussion posts, rather than short, clippy newsy posts. I would assume that the short clipply post would better serve a legislative caucus blog.

Nafziger’s current personal blog has only two posts up on it, though he’s been blogging for at least three years. But, on the internet, nothing is really gone. I’ve subscribed to his blog since before he quit the school board, so I shared some of his old deleted posts here.

To me, it doesn’t matter at all if Nafziger is really doing the blogging. Good on him, good on the caucus, good on Brown.

The only thing I’d like to see improved is the length of the posts. In my internet reading habit, I’ve never been able to get my head around his posts in time to comment, though I’d like to.

Oh thank God for you Mr. Knight, what would we have done without you?

December 20, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

The Sitting Duck got up and left after five years and some months in Olympia. After having passively read it for most of the five years and closely for the past few months (ever since publisher Knight got into a scuffle in Lewis County), I’m not sad to see the paper and publisher Terrence Knight leave.

Actually I’m kind of happy.

I was never all that impressed by the journalistic effort of the Sitting Duck, and after reading the “see you later (not!), screw you” edition of the paper, I know exactly why.

Knight writes about bee-bopping around Olympia in the Summer of 2002, just more than a year after the bottom fell out of downtown. The Nisqually earthquake disconnected downtown by closing the 4th Avenue bridge, so the downtown Olympia that Knight found was a depressing version of the downtown that I grew up with.

His specific reference to the Spar is especially troubling to me. By the time he made it to the Spar, it was a sad shadow of the restaurant that I grew up with. To me, Mcmenamins buying the Spar was a sigh of relief. The service is worse there now, but I’m still glad it moved on to new ownership.

I could go on for awhile about how I resent being told about the soul of my town from someone who moved here in 2002 and is now leaving, but let me just say this: Knight is full of himself. I cite the end of his “I’m outa here” column, Knight speaking of himself as the hero in “The Magnificent Seven:”

And so they ride back and shoot up the bad guys and in the process get pretty well shot up themselves. But they’ve empowered the villagers as best they can, and now its up to (the villagers) to protect themselves.

Like many before us, we had fallen in love with the curious character of our moderately famous community, and believing that ideas, truth, and words still make a difference, we’re determined to give it a voice. That’s what we came here to do and we have done our very best. We tried to fight the good fight. The fight isn’t over though — it never is — and our biggest worry is that during the next few years, Olympia will need, more than ever, an alternative and original voice.

…

Our work here is done. And now it’s time to ride on.

Well, since you did your harm to public discourse in this town, I’m happy to see you leave. We did an ok job before you got here, we’ll survive without your inflated ego.

To Berd Whitlock: Triage sucks but its real

December 20, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Berd wrote over at the Olympian:

There are some substantial differences between the battle between a Citizen’s Group and the Port of Tacoma over Rocky Prairie; and the battle between Citizens’ Groups and the City of Olympia and Developer Triway Enterprises over the downtown Olympia “isthmus.” But there are a lot of similarities. Similar sets of logic apply to the situation here in Olympia, as compared to the situation in Rocky Prairie. Despite the differences, the best decision in the local Olympia case might very well be to pull the property off the market. City Council has the ability to enact a moratorium ordinance on the currently passed rezone. That would provide time to figure out how to go about creating a truly wonderful and novel park feature – a park feature that would accent the natural beauty that exists in such quantity here in Olympia. Would that be the right move to make? Seems so to me.

The main difference in terms of environmental restoration between the isthmus property and the Rocky Prarie property is that the isthmus property is more expensive and matters less.

Not to say that the isthmus property doesn’t matter at all or that the cost is impossible to get to to buy it and restore it, its just the Rocky Prairie property is current undeveloped, is still ecologically connected to other large pieces of habitat. The isthmus properties, though easier to find on a walk from my house, would be islands of good habitat among bad.

A regrettable, yet real, concept being kicked around in restoration circles is called triage. Basically, with the limited resources we have to put towards species and habitat restoration, we have to choose what to go after first.

Here’s a basic primer on the debate and another and a response to it.

So, if I had $100,000 to spend on saving some land from development, I’d spend it at Rocky Prairie first, then figure out where to go from there.

By the way, God bless you for being out there tonight.

The changing press corp who happen to work in Olympia

December 19, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

If we sent the Seattle Times $100,000, do you think they’d be able to bring David Postman back?

I’m not eager to link to him two days in a row, but Goldy is proposing raising $15,000 to send Josh Feit (who I have my own immature problems with) to Olympia to cover the legislature. I’d assume that people would chip in, maybe even the entire amount, because not only do they fear the effects on democracy of a shrinking press corp, they particularly like Feit’s politics.

Fitting that Goldy puts this out there on the same day that Andrew Garber from the legacy Seattle Times points out he doesn’t have that many people of the same profession to hang out with.

I think its fitting that now that we have a state budget database, that the governor can release her budget during a snow storm and get it out online and that TVW is more robust than ever, that the actual press corp is shrinking.

I do see a real role for honest brokers (along the lines of Fact Check), but the role’s of people like Josh Feit will be more and more imporant. Garber’s piece noted that former reporters, lobbyists and PR folks outnumber actual reporters in Olympia. That’s not exactly a bad thing, as long as some of them are keeping eyes on each other.

I envision organizations hiring more people like Feit to do thingly vieled partisan journalism. Instead of paid reporters standing between the sides, telling you what’s going on second hand, you’ll actually see hand to hand combat, sort of like the opinion page blew up all over the front living room. With searchable databases, of course.

Or, sort of like the good ol’days of Publius and Silence Dogood.

Don’t worry, Goldy doesn’t remember Seattle in 1990

December 18, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Hey, that’s not the Great Lake out there, its the northern Pacific Ocean.

Goldy’s whining over the last couple of days about the no-snow-snow-closures in Seattle reminds me how odd it is for the state’s most popular liberal blogger (can anyone tell me that he isn’t) to not really get the region he’s writing about.

No matter how easy it would be understand how different Seattle and many Puget Sound cities are from most east coast cities both in terms of climate and topography, he just seems to gripe that we don’t react to snow storms the way those hardened east coasters do.

We remember when we don’t take these things seriously because:

Our kindergardener daughter was stuck at Kimball all day, and had to eat Fruit Loops, a great topic of subsequent conversation. Her school bus dropped her off on 19th at 10 PM. Fortunately she found her way home (we’d been alerted by phone to await her a block away!).

And:

In 1990, I was living in the north end and working in Ballard. I left work when the snow began to stick (not a good tactic) and made it to about a mile from my mother’s house, got stuck on a hill, got help from helpful people to get my car safely parked without hitting any other vehicles, then walked the rest of the way to pick up my four-month-old.

We stayed at my mom’s until the power went out, and then we bundled up the baby and walked 10 blocks to my house. My husband was driving home from the Eastside and arrived at two in the morning.

Since we don’t get wall to wall snow, we don’t prepare for big storms. We just let them happen and assume the few days at home won’t hurt us too much. But, we’re also more cautious about going out, since we know we’re not prepared.

The stories of the 1990 storm reminded me of another snow related incident a year earlier. The late King County prosecutor’s, Norm Maleng, daughter was killed in 1989 in a sledding accident.

Those kinds of accidents are not uncommon, but going from the a notorious snow death in 1989 to kids being stuck in schools in 1990, probably keeps decision makers more trigger happy to keep kids indoors.

In person commission forum cancelled, time for a virtual forum

December 18, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

The snow is going to prevent the PCOs from meeting to talk to the applicants for the open county commission seat. Via email:

Commissioner Applicant Forum Cancelled
Dear Thurston County Democrats,

Due to the snow we have canceled tomorrow evenings Commissioner Applicant Forum.

We are looking at rescheduling the Third Commissioner District PCO Forum for Saturday January 3, 2009 prior to January 5th vote by the full Central Committee. Having it on Saturday will allow us more time (maybe three hours instead of two) so that we get a chance to learn more about the candidates.

I apologize for any inconvenience.

Jim Cooper
Chair, Thurston County Democrats

If only there were devices on which we could type questions, and the applicants could then respond in real time. Oh yeah, there is.

If between Christmas and the snow we can’t get together, we shouldn’t keep our traps shut online. We should be talking about this.

PCO silence on open county commission seat

December 18, 2008 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Crickets so far, aside from Ken and I, in terms of the county commissioner application process.

So, frustrated, I write off an email to my fellow precinct committee officers. I mean, if we’re the ones that are going to send a list off the to the county commissioners from them to pick from, the least we can do is take the process seriously:

I’ve been wondering what standards people are putting towards the applicants for the open county commission seat. I’ll be honest, I’m judging differently than I would if I was choosing a candidate to support. In that case, I’d look for someone I think would be an effective legislator second and someone whose policies I would support first.

In this case, I’m looking for someone who can “do the job,” who has proven through elected office that they’re responsible stewards. Participation in regional boards comes second, campaign experience a close third.

Speaking of the difference between a campaign and this appointment process, since we’re subverting an actual public campaign, the lack of discussion so far between PCOs in a public forum is troubling. Since we’re representing the voters in some regard here, we have a responsibility to discuss in a public setting this public.

There have been several blog posts written on the various candidates, one at least on our own blog. Please comment there (http://thurstondemocrats.org/node/975). Or, at least lets talk amongst ourselves on this email list.

Thanks,
Emmett

This sort of gets at what one of the applicants, Jeff Dickison (who I work with), wrote in a comment over at Ken’s blog:

I am frankly astounded at the deafening silence. Mere weeks after one of the greatest activist elections in history it is as if everyone has packed up their political antennae and gone home.

In the two email lists available for PCOs, there has been a smattering of discussion, but nothing substantial. This is disappointing to say the least. To say more, its freaking me out.

I feel we’re on the verge of making a bad decision.