Category: Uncategorized (Page 29 of 49)

But, she’s alive. Despite being dropped from the Kitsap Business Journal, Adele is still very much being printed by other weeklies around Washington. Here and here for example.

This is pretty scary:

(Port Commissioners) said the (city hall) project won’t generate the foot traffic and economic activity they want at night and on weekends.

A City Hall would have to have shops on the ground floor or some other venue to draw people to the area after the offices have closed, the port officials said Monday. City officials, who previously were lukewarm to the idea, agreed to at least talk about it.

The problem is that the port doesn’t want to build up their property and have one section of it shut down at 5 every night. I can understand that desire, but why is there an assumption that only commercial space can fill that role? The image of our city hall having ground floor retail space reminds me of Tukwila, Seatac or Lynwood.

Retail space isn’t the only use that will create activity after 5p. Here’s an idea just off the top of my head. The current Olympia Library is just over 20,000 square feet, too small for Olympia. In the late 90s there was an effort to build a new library down by where Yardbirds used to be, but that bond failed.

If the port wants folks to be down on their properties after 5, why do they have to be shopping? Why can’t they be engaged in public, civic activties that center around the better part of life?

The solution could be a branch civic library, with reading and meeting space open after hours. The Timberland Library system already has experimented with providing library services in alernative spaces (in rural areas only though). This would be like a cross between the Olympia center and the current library, but as an alternative to both.

This isn’t a perfect idea, but what I’m saying is that we don’t have to settle for stores on the ground floor of our city hall.

Earlier this “Sunshine” week, State Auditor Brian Sonntag, AG Rob McKenna, the Olympian’s publisher and the Timberland Regional Library Community Service Manager Michael Wessells got together to talk about open public access to government. Go here for a listen. Overall, not a bad hour to listen to, if not groundbreaking. Most of us have heard this stuff before, but it was interesting to hear nonetheless.

The Olympian allowed questions in the week leading up to the forum, and I was surprised that they got to mine early in the forum (about 36 minutes in) because it really didn’t deal directly with access to records. Rather I wanted to know about efforts to increase citizen dialogue with government. Take, for example, public hearings or public comment periods where the government opens up simply to fulfill the letter of the law, not to dialogue with citizens.

Bill Schneider wrote about this problem at New West.

McKenna responded its important to hold regular town hall meetings, allow for a give and take. Its good to have it for all elected officials to have. He heard from folks during his public forums on open records and gleaned some good ideas for his

Eve Johnson, the very capable moderator from LWV, mentioned that Olympia puts everything in their packet online and is also putting videos of their meetings online.

“It’s a tough job… most of them are trying to do the right thing” the Olympian publisher. Some ideas like forums are very useful. Subcommittee meetings can also help focus citizen involvement.

The gentleman from the library mentioned that citizens needs to be educated before they speak up (good point) and there are other channels, such as letters to the editor.

Good points all. If we expect that the public comment period at the start of local meetings is the extent to which we can dialogue with government, we’re very wrong. I like the suggestion from Wessells and McKenna together. We need to encourage more and regular town hall meetings, and it isn’t always the government that should take care of it.

Spured by the discussion a little while back on reforming the initiative process (at horsesass, Evergreen Politics and here) I’ve decided to start a low frequency campaign to shrink the allowed size of intiative petitions from 11″x17″ to 8.5″x11″, making it possible for anyone to print out a petition from their home printer and collect signatures.

I’ve started a new blog at This is what (printer) Democracy looks like to solicit ideas to improve where I’m at right now, get criticized and hopefully not ignored. In a few weeks, I’m going to start talking to some other folks around Olympia (including my representatives and folks at the SoS office) to see if I have any chance in hell of making this happen.

The idea is to make the entry point into the initiative process lower so the product represents more closer the public will.

David at horesass.org has some good reforms for the initiative process:

1. Ban paying per signature
2. Restrict editorial content on petitions
3. Allow legal challenges prior to the ballot to prevent blatantly unconstitutional or illegal initiatives from making it to the ballot
4. Create incentives for filing initiatives to the legislature to encourage democratic deliberation
5. Charge a reasonable filing fee to prevent frivolous filings

The only idea I don’t like is increasing the filing fee because it restricts the process to folks that can afford it. Tim Eyman and money interests otherwise won’t have a problem coming up with any fee, even if you put it in the thousands of dollars. It won’t restrict them from filing frivolous initiatives. What is will do is restrict less-moneyed folks from coming forward.

My dream reform would be to simply change the size of the petition page sheet from “not less than eleven inches in width and not less than fourteen inches in length,” to “not less than 8.5 inches in width and not less than 11 inches in length.” (Here is the RCW)

Right now, hardly anyone can print petitions out on a home printer (unless you have a really nice printer with some large paper). If you allow a petition size small enough to print out at home, you potentially make a much larger group of people signature gatherers. If you want to blunt the effect of paid gatherers in general (David notes that you can’t make it illegal for people to get paid, just paid per signature) you make everyone a signature gatherer.

Imagine printing off a signature page, signing it yourself, and then walking around with it for the next few days asking your family and friends to sign it too. It changes signature gathering for an initiative from a commercial process outside a Mariners game to something more regular and everyday.

Instead of a paid signature gatherer asking for your support, its a friend of yours. Speading out the ability of gathering signatures makes it less likely that people will sign initiatives supported by bands of paid gatherers. They will seem shrill and base compared to honest friends that ask for your support.

And, its only changing two numbers in one line of law.

Krist Novoselic posts a diary on Washblog.com today, and I’m happy that he’s putting out there issues that as Democrats (and Republicans for that matter) pretty much ignore. We allow out state party to sue over the primary election, but we don’t discuss much a system we’d rather see. I know Republicans would rather not see tons of people vote or get involved, but as Democrats we should more seriously our role in politcal life and how we can increase participation, not just in voting but in general.

I like this graph the best, but read the entire thing for yourself:

The grassroots of the major parties are weak. Their abdication only makes more room for initiative peddlers, media, political consultants and the special interests that fund the whole enterprise.

The solution is more participation based in the notion of people coming together for the common good. The party rank-and-file can and need to resolve the current crisis by holding precinct nominating conventions and endorsing Ranked Choice Voting. The alternative is continued irrelevance.

Association of Citizens Concerned About Chambers Lake Basin

Our original website was basic and informative, but didn’t offer a way for anyone except for the webmaster to edit or add anything. This new drupal based site will let anyone of our members add comments, and our leaders add front page conent, including events.

I have been for the past few weeks trying to find a way to tie an email discussion group with a drupal/civicspace site, but I’m not that big of a nerd yet, so I gave up. For my NA instead I grabbed a google group, which should be nice.

Now that I’ve done this, I’m wondering if there is a way for all the NA websites in Olympia (and beyond?) to tie together. Hmmm… smarter people than me should ponder this as well.

What started as a, relatively speaking, fairly innocent post about why the folks at the state party were having trouble accessing Washblog.com has turned into a horror-show. Take a look for yourself.

There are a lot of things I could say here, but suffice to say, its no wonder that the 80 percent of the people in the middle think the 10 percent at each end are crazy.

This is a brainstorm I had last night that I’m still pretty excited about. I crossposted it at Better Donkey, because Democrats are good at education and democracy.

A few weeks back some schools back east made some ink by making sure (or at least making noise that they were going to try to make sure) their students weren’t using social websites like myspac.com or xanga to socialize. At the same time, we’re seeing deepening disengagement among youth politically and civically.

While voting among “youth” (18-24 year olds) surged in 2004 by 11 percent, voting is only the apex of a much broader category of participation that includes anything from writing a letter to the editor, attending a meeting, joining an organization or blogging. To that end, schools shouldn’t ban social websites, they should encourage them, or even require them as part of an overall education to train students how to be engaged.

We talk alot about wired government and extreme democracy, and a lot of that talk has to do with how technology will change the way we do politics. Much of it though experiences the slow grinding pain that is politics, so in our everyday life we aren’t seeing much of it.

But, high school governments that are lead by high schoolers who are already using many of the tools that we want to see used in campaigns and governments, are uniquely qualified to be a training ground for citizenship skills and a testing ground for online democracy.

Imagine showing up at school, and part of being a student in an online account (with myspace or maybe a school centered website) where in addition to simply, you are required to be involved in some level of student government. You either must propose or support certain ideas, register your vote on initiatives and vote, nominate and then complain to your officers.

We teach about our government and civics, but (from my experience) we do little to train the skills needed to be an active citizen or use the tools that will facilitate that engagement. The popular Newspapers in Education program promotes reading newspapers to high school students, but it ignores how most of us will engage in the future.

We’re also in a time where those skills are being adapted to new technologies and those technologies are being best used not by use almost 30-somethings, but by the kids coming up behind us.