1. Mayor Greg Nickels will announce his final proposed budget this afternoon at 2:00, including a plan for financing the city’s $930 million portion of the deep-bore waterfront tunnel. There’s also a rumor that Joe Mallahan, one of two candidates who defeated Nickels in the primary, will announce his own viaduct financing proposal soon.
2. Cindi Laws, campaign manager for city attorney Tom Carr, responded to an item in yesterday’s Morning Fizz noting that Carr (in sharp contrast to the mayor) had only received one contribution from an employee at his office—$650 from civil division head Suzanne Skinner.
Laws noted that it’s against the law for candidates to solicit money from their employees. True. (Nickels’ employees gave generously anyway). Second, she said, “It has been city policy, going back three or four city attorneys, specifically to ask the people in the office not to contribute to the campaign because they did not want to create a situation where the lawyers there, or any other employees of the city attorney’s office, felt that they had to contribute as a condition of their employment … To imply that Tom doesn’t have the support of his employees is just a cheap shot at best.”
Carr was elected in 2001. <strike>Unfortunately, detailed city election records don’t go back past 2003.</strike> City records go back online until 1996. In 2001, when he first ran for election, Carr received $1,094 from city of Seattle employees. In 2005, he received $650 from one city employee, R.B. Vincent. In 1997, Carr’s predecessor, Mark Sidran, reported no contributions from city employees.
3. The Seattle Municipal League released its ratings for candidates for King County Assessor earlier this week. (Ratings for candidates in other races, released earlier this year, can be found here).
Interestingly, of the two leading contenders, newcomer Bob Rosenberger, a real estate investor and former appraiser who just got into the race last month, against Port Commissioner Lloyd Hara, was rated “very good”; Hara, just “good.”
4. Saroja Reddy and Ellen Petre, the two county council employees who were given their walking papers by County Council member and King County Executive candidate Dow Constantine earlier this week, will spend the rest of the year doing “special assignments” from home. Translation: They’ll be paid to stay at home.
Still sounds like a raw deal. As we wrote yesterday, Reddy (we don’t know Petre) is a competent, professional policy staff director (she held a similar, but less politically charged, position at City Hall) who found out she was losing her job five minutes before the county council voted to terminate her.
5. This weekend is the annual Sustainable Ballard Festival, featuring a green fashion show, a demonstration “urban farm,” and a two-hour bike tour of the neighborhood’s “chicken coops, shared gardens, P-Patches, rain barrels, green buildings, cider presses, art, and more.” All free; more info here.
6. PubliCola was hopping late in the day yesterday. If you left work early and missed all the action, check it out: Posts on Mallahan spokeswoman Charla Neuman’s denial that her candidate opposes the commercial parking tax (including a lively comments thread); allegations by KC Executive candidate Susan Hutchison that rival Constantine’s campaign may have engaged in “illegal” campaign activity; city council member Nick Licata on why he won’t be supporting Carr; and more.
The Muni League ratings for assessor makes a lot of sense. This is a technical office with professional staff that needs a technocrat like Bob Rosenberger to supervise and not a career politician. Rosenberger also received the most number of Democratic Districts in 5 weeks than Hara did in 5 months!
Is that a retraction?
WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY!!11
Re #4 above, Are these layoffs just newsworthy because you know the people involved? I just don’t get the story here.
Nickels got 25% of his donations from city employees and councilmembers get support from their employees. The rules barring a public employer leaning on employees for donations are the same for them, as for Carr.
Yet out of some 400 employees, Carr gets one donation?
One?
Kinda sad. Those are the folks who know him the best in his role as city attorney.
I really like the fizz. Some days I wish the fizz had some skim-friendly formatting… headers? bold key phrases?
xo
@5: Besides the automatic assumption that Carr’s employees don’t love him the way Nickels’ employees loved (still love, perhaps) him, there are more likely glosses:
Carr’s a lawyer and is probably more inclined to be careful about the appearance of impropriety than Nickels.
Carr did not lean (threaten?) on his employees the way Nickels did.
I certainly don’t support Carr and will vote for Holmes, but can’t see this issue being a defining one for Carr.
@4 re #4, couldn’t agree more.
@6 It takes less than a minute to read the whole fizz. What more do you want? A summary of a summary?
@8 Couldn’t agree more as well – let’s see if the council misses a beat when these two are gone … then we’ll know if these cuts were justified.
@2: No.
@10: so publicola reports Carr “hasn’t gotten much love from his own employees”, then the next day it reports a response which seems to suggest the first story was way off-base. If it goes the extra step of independently verifying Laws’s assertion, Publicola can get beyond treating responses to its allegations as news.
@4 and 8 re # 4. If for no other reason, this is newsworthy because it matters how public officials treat their own employees. One has to wonder about a public official who claims to be a “progressive” and then treats his own employees very badly. And it matters when citizens are deprived of good public servants — for whatever reason.
11. So, one day they comment on a general item whose stated sentiment was gleaned from several sources. And the next day they report on a response to that item from a different source. What did she do wrong again?
Publicola had better file as a 527 for McGinn if this keeps up.
Re Cindi’s assertion that “It has been city policy, going back three or four city attorneys, specifically to ask the people in the office not to contribute to the campaign because they did not want to create a situation where the lawyers there, or any other employees of the city attorney’s office, felt that they had to contribute as a condition of their employment.”
When was the last time an incumbent city attorney was challenged? It seems to me that’s the only time a sitting city attorney would be faced with the need to raise a substantial sum of money. If this is some long-standing tradition, as Cindi seems to think, the last time it was actually invoked would have been sometime pre-Sidran, which was a long time ago.
Also, did Carr specifically ask his employees not to contribute to him? If not, did he impart that message by some other means? And if he didn’t want his employees to contribute, then why did he accept $650 from one of his employees? That’s not an insignificant sum of money in what is a relatively low budget race compared to other city campaigns.
@14,
Here’s a recent sampling of our McGinn coverage:
We reported that one of McGinn’s polsters was once a convicted felon http://publicola.net/?p=14531 (a story we broke); trashed McGinn’s budget proposal http://publicola.net/?p=14191; grilled him on his cozy rltshp. with Vulcan (a story we broke) http://publicola.net/?p=13766; reported on the serious questions about his viaduct plan http://publicola.net/?p=14535; explained why the KC Labor Council thinks he’s not up to the job http://publicola.net/?p=14362; critiqued his light rail plan http://publicola.net/?p=14186; dissected his misleading campaign pitch http://publicola.net/?p=14073; and trashed him for defending T-Mobile’s anti-consumer practices as their hired gun attorney (a story we broke) http://publicola.net/?p=11631 … just to name a few.
Yes, we’re hard on Mallahan, but as the record here shows, we’re also hard on McGinn.
And for what it’s worth, this week, PubliCola was (as far as I know) the only site that gave much coverage to Mallahan’s big KC Democrats endorsement http://publicola.net/?p=14700 or posted his pro-gay rights video http://publicola.net/?p=14790
@16: On paper it all looks good as far as numbers go–maybe even word count, though I don’t have the time to count them all; but the tone of the articles–different story.
Also, it is what is missing from the analysis, and not what is necessarily included–propoaganda by omission–that is the most pervasive in many of these pro McGinn posts. Mallahan doesn’t get the same consideration.
Nothing wrong with being biased. Just don’t try to play the objectivity game.
re: the anon at 14 and 17… To be fair, as someone who doesn’t like either candidate and will probably abstain from voting on the Mayor’s race… Mallahan hasn’t done much to win over voters as a candidate. McGinn has certainly tried with his proposals, though he’s obviously stumbled quite a bit himself. So it would figure that you’d see far less coverage of positive Mallahan campaigning… because, honestly, what has Mallahan done of significance?
@17,
Read the batch of articles on McGinn I cited above.
Not to distract from the political banter, but thanks for mentioning the Sustainable Ballard Festival!
@19: I have. Read the latest McGinn press release that reads just like one of the Publicola articles.
@12, you make a good point if the assumption is that letting people go means they were treated badly or unfairly. but the unfortunate newsflash is that king county needs to let a lot of people go given the budget deficit.
@22 I agree that the budget problems in King County are huge and serious, and that these problems will (and have) resulted in people being laid off. (I leave aside the issues of the failure of the Council to address these problems in preceding years and their failure to develop a more humane, coherent, and fairer plan for dealing with them.) But no, I was not assuming simply that letting people go always means that they were treated badly or unfairly. The point of #4 was that “it seemed like a raw deal,” and furthermore that one of the people who had her position terminated had only five minutes of advance notification. Does that seem fair to you? Or respectful of that person’s service? It doesn’t to me, and you also have to consider the possibility that there were other things going on, for instance, that these emplotyees’ positions (and lives) became a political football in Constantine’s campaign. In any event, laying people off is, and should be seen as, a drastic step. It requires that the employees be treated fairly and with respect and dignity. And I believe that a truly progressive public official would first exhaust all alternatives to terminating a position or an employee, like getting rid of vacant positions, asking the employee to take a cut in pay, or sharing the burden with other employees (e.g., through furloughs).
RE: Saroja Reddy
She’s about as much a genius as my cat.
It was a good day when they gave her the boot.
Hey, I know, maybe you can help her get hired back at the City since you know, you wax poetic about her “abilities”.
Trust me, if she was awesome, they would not have let her go.
@24 Do you consider yourself a moral or ethical person!? That is just a vicious, nasty, uninformed and ignorant thing to say — essentially defamation in the legal sense. And what makes you think you have the right or the expertise to make such libellous statements about a dedicated public servant who has served as long as she has? You should check out her record. I did. Even Dow Constantine has been singing her praises.
@25. “even Dow Constantine has been singing her praises”.
Um.
The guy is a running for office—do you actually expect him to say “um, yeah, i had a total dingbat for a policy staff director and i am really sorry about that…my bad”?
What is immoral or unethical about calling the facts as I know them? (yep, I work for the county and have first hand knowledge of the 12th floor shenanigans).
I stick by my statement: if either had been doing awesome work, they would not have been let go.
And by the way, you’ve got alot of time on your hands if you are checking out her “record”. Why don’t you do something productive? Volunteer somewhere?
@26 I see, so now you are accusing Constantine of lying about this. From what I can tell, you are just a vicious person. And yes viciousness is very much about morality and ethics. The root of the word is “vice” and the opposite of vice is virtue. Morally, you don’t have the right to go around accusing people of having the intelligence of a cat in a public context such as this. And even legally, you create libability for yourself by doing so. If Ms. Reddy was a well-known politician, you would have more license to say such things. But she is not, and because of that, truth is your only defense against an accusation of libel. Saying that she has the intelligence of your cat is not the truth by any stretch of the imagination. Alas, I fear that the intelligence that you are insulting the most in this case is your own.
It amazes me that she gets laid off by King County while a person like you is allowed to continue working there. But on the assumption that you work for the County Council, your viciousness and incivility provides support for the criticism that it is a nasty institutional culture. I have heard that from many people. No doubt, there are many decent and hard-working people there. But apparently there are some vicious, overly ambitious, back-stabbing, and just plain mean people there who debase the institutional culture and the values of public service.
I haven’t been spending a lot of time checking out Ms. Reddy’s record. I have checked it out over many years. She received many accolades and positive press coverage for her work at the City Council.
You have your facts wrong about Constantine and Reddy. He was not Chair when she was hired, and the word is that Ms. Reddy worked very well with the previous Chair, and that Constantine had a very different view of how the policy staff should be organized and run. She was hired specifically for the purpose of the professional development of the policy staff as an independent policy director, but apparently Constantine didn’t see things that way. Anyway, I’m sure she’ll land on her feet.
Like a lot of vicious and uncivil people, you seem to have a tendency to resort to ad hominem arguments, which is essentially what your argument about me having a lot of time on my hands was. I shouldn’t have to say this, but FYI I have been on vacation recently, and in any case, I don’t have a job that requires me to have a conventional workday in an office. But I assure you that I wouldn’t be doing this blogging while I was in my office, and that apparently is not a boundary that you think you have to observe. Or perhaps you too are on vacation now.
I am having a difficult time making sense of the extreme nature of your hostility and contempt towards Ms. Reddy. Does it have anything to do with the fact that she is a woman of color?
Dear Ms. Monk,
What are you so worked up about? Uncivil? Vicious? Who’s calling names…me or you?
You are quite attached to the issues, aren’t you? I wonder why…hmmmm.
I scoff in your general direction. Scoff followed by giggle.
Get a life, dear.
Ms. Monk? It’s actually a Mr. So you’ve got the wrong person, though I admit that I know Ms. Reddy..
I was just responding to your attacks on her — yes, your mean, unfounded, and libellous attacks. And now of course you aren’t accepting any responsibiliy. That figures. Bye.
Mr Monk are you saying she’ll land on her feet because she has the intelligence of a cat? Are you saying that because she’s a woman of color? Ok, please don’t waste 45 minutes responding to that, but I think you need a little more evidence before you go throwing the race card around.
Thanks for the lesson on vice and ad hominem–once again I learn something from you. Philosophy major by chance?
@30 I like your attitude and I appreciate your comments, even when I disagree! The comment about landing on her feet was kind of a joke… sorry, that didn’t come off very well. You know, cats have nine lives and all that.
As I said elsewhere, I have no reason to believe that Ms. Reddy was laid off because of race (though it most certainly affects the racial composition there). But I think that noways’ animus towards her is kind of strange, and was wondering if something like that is going on with him.
Yes, I studied philosophy as an undergraduate — also religion! Again, I appreciate your willingness to engage me, and I certainly want us to remain civil about it. We all should try to remain open to having our arguments challenged. I just don’t want things always to lapse into the shallow and unreasoned mode of the sound byte. That’s why I have put some time into my responses — though I have less of that for this blogging stuff now!
WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY!!11