Olympia Time

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

October 3, 2009 / / 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 / / 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 / / 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 / / 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 / / 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 / / 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.

Why I haven’t been blogging (why I haven’t been feeling it)

September 29, 2009 / / 0 Comments

For at least the last eight years or so, in various forms, I’ve blogged pretty regularly. There have been times I’ve closed old blogs, stopped blogging at other people’s blogs and consolidated posts on this blog. Anyway, there have also been times I haven’t blogged for awhile, but since about January of this year, my blogging here has been stalling (and for the past few weeks) grinding to a halt.

Some reasons for that include the obvious attention suck that Facebook and Twitter have become. But, there has also been the time I’ve spent thinking about the entire isthmus debate here in Olympia, and the stress I’ve felt of various groups of people I respect falling on different sides of the issue. While I respect everyone’s opinion, it has become a issue I have a hard time getting a hold of the issue, and I have gotten tired of the debate and the sides those got chosen up.

Either way, I’m going to make a concerted effort to keep on blogging. I realize that the above was a horrible reason why I have held off blogging, but here I am.

Lacey residents don’t go out at night, don’t travel beyond city limits

August 24, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Ken of Lacey has a problem with a political forum being held at night in a neighboring city by a countywide organization.

Much better for residents to take a long lunch to hear another forum in the middle of the day.

So, let me get this right. Lacey residents can’t drive three miles out of town to attend a forum in Olympia, but they have time to take off in the middle of the day to attend a forum that is marginally close? O.k.

Precincts that vote low in primaries

August 21, 2009 / / 0 Comments

One of the most interesting parts of the primary election cycle in Olympia for me is the difference between the folks that vote in the primary and those that vote in the general a few months later.

While I was really wrong about my original assumption about low turnout during this primary, its still interesting to look at what precincts will provide more votes in November.

The primary two years ago had a classic example of this shifting primary/general electorate. Rhenda Strub got through the primary with 3,000 votes (39 percent) but won the general with over 6,000 votes (55 percent). Her opponent barely improved here vote total in the primary, picking up less than 1,000 of the more than 4,000 available new votes.

So, there are a handful of precincts in Olympia that compared to the general in 2007 (the only comparable primary because it was the only one also held in August) voted in low numbers during the 2009 primary. The map below shows the 10 precincts that had less than 65 percent of the votes they had in 2007.


View under vote precincts in a larger map

Just a few thoughts about these precincts:

1. Most are on the edges of town. You could assume that these, then, are people who spend less time downtown and might shop in Lacey as much as they shop in Olympia.

2. 4 of the 10 are in SE Olympia. These are newer, probably more conservative (by Olympia standards) areas.

3. If you care about downtown, you voted in this election. I haven’t mapped the anti-Larida Passage candidates by precinct, so I don’t know if they did particularly well in one part of town. But from the low turnout in the non-downtown focused areas, I feel safe to say that Larida Passage brought people out for this one.

4. On the other hand, there will be people voting in November that don’t care much about Larida Passage. Turnout is going up in November, especially in these precincts. The question is who is going to speak to these folks who stayed out of the primary?

Shocked! Shocked! Lewis County Republicans would never call anyone a Nazi!

August 7, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Unless it was like last year.

In response to Rep. Brian Baird’s unfortunate, yet seemingly accurate, “brown shirt” comment, Lewis County GOPer gets all huffy:

The reference to Nazism and the equating of his constituents to Brown Shirts is very offensive, not only to the brave veterans in our state who have fought in wars from Europe to Iraq and Afghanistan, but to all freedom-loving citizens who value their right to express their personal opinions about the actions being taken by their elected representatives – whether or not they agree with them.

Of course, its certainly not offensive when the Lewis County Republicans call you a Nazi.

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