1. Last night’s PubliCola-sponsored election recap at Liberty on Capitol Hill, starring KOMO’s conservative radio talk jock John Carlson and state Democratic Party chair Dwight Pelz, featured a number of heated exchanges—and two very different interpretations of what happened in last week’s elections. Marco Lowe, head of the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations who teaches a class on elections and campaigns at Seattle University, moderated.
Some highlights:
Pelz, on the question of which party will have “momentum” in 2012: “Momentum is very elusive. You guys drove the nation into the ditch for eight years, and we’ve had it for a year and a half, and somehow we didn’t put everybody back to work?”
Carlson, on Pelz’s accusation that the Republicans are more fixated on hurting the president than fixing the nation: “The Republicans didn’t help him pass health care. Hell, no—why would they? If Obama had his way he’d be taking us in the direction of Western Europe. Greece, Spain, Ireland—those countries are going broke because of the welfare model of their states.” Pelz’s response: “The Republican model is Mexico.”
Pelz, on why liquor privatization failed: “Washingtonians are used to having open ballots, and they’re used to driving long distances at odd hours to buy a bottle of whiskey.”
And Pelz, on why Democrats can’t seem to wrest the Eighth Congressional District away from Republican Dave Reichert after three consecutive, well-funded tries: “The Eighth is the most Democratic district in the country held by a Republican. Reichert is the sheriff, and on his own, he’s popular. And second, we didn’t have a farm team over there. If Reichert were to retire and Rodney Tom were to run for Congress against Reagan Dunn, I think Rodney Tom could win.”
Thanks everybody for coming.
2. Seattle Public Schools’ latest scorecard, curiously, didn’t include a map showing where failing schools were concentrated. “Because they’re all in the South End,” city council member Tim Burgess told PubliCola yesterday, pointing to a map created by his staff that demonstrated just that. Rainier Valley Post also took a close look at the numbers, and found that not one school in the south end received a ranking higher than a “C”—and three out of 10 South End elementary schools were failing. Meanwhile, Aki Kurose Middle School got an F, while Cleveland and Rainier Beach High each got Ds.
3. The city council is set to start voting on the budget. We’ll have a full report on what they decide later today. In the meantime, PubliCola has heard that in addition to rejecting Mayor Mike McGinn’s proposal to increase the commercial parking tax to 17.5 percent (the council wants to raise it 2.5 points, to 12.5 percent, to help pay for early design work on the seawall), the council will consider using some of its $8.5 million loan from the Museum of History and Industry to help fund some of McGinn’s proposed Walk Bike Ride projects.
(Background: MOHAI made more money than expected from the sale of its property in Montlake, which the museum has to leave for the construction of a new SR-520 bridge. The museum agreed to loan the city the money for two years, with no interest. McGinn opposed the loan and demanded that MOHAI simply give the city the money; he now says the loan should pay to renovate a building in Magnuson Park.)
Both the mayor and council members have said they prefer that the MOHAI money go to one-time capital projects, since it isn’t an ongoing revenue source. Insiders at the council say council members are considering focusing some of the money on pedestrian improvements, like sidewalks and crosswalks, that McGinn’s commercial parking tax would have paid for. It’s unclear what McGinn’s reaction will be to any proposal to shift the MOHAI money to pedestrian projects and away from renovations at Magnuson.
4. Although McGinn asserted in yesterday’s Fizz that the city’s transportation budget has been “cut to the bone,” that’s not exactly true. Compared to last year’s adopted budget proposal, in fact, McGinn’s budget increases funding for the Seattle Department of Transportation about one percent. Even without McGinn’s five-point proposed increase in the commercial parking tax, SDOT’s budget will likely decline only about one percent from 2010 to 2011—significantly less than the cuts that other departments are being asked to make. From the human services department to neighborhoods to Seattle Municipal Court, nearly every city department is being cut between four and 18 percent.
McGinn says SDOT is taking a smaller cut in 2011 because it took such a big hit during this year’s mid-year cuts—about $6.6 million, or around 15 percent. But council staffers argue that the accurate comparison, for any city department, is between the adopted 2010 budget and the proposed 2011 budget. And they point out that SDOT was hardly the only department to make midyear budget cuts—the housing department, for example, took a 16 percent hit, and the city’s IT department was cut 11.3 percent.
5. If the Sen. Harry Reid/Sharron Angle race was the most symbolic contest in the country—the Democratic majority leader vs. a Tea Party upstart—then the race for the state house seat in the 48th Legislative District in Seattle’s Eastside suburbs was the most symbolic in Washington State: the Democrats’ finance chair, state Rep. Ross Hunter, who commandeered the controversial budget vs. former Washington State Republican Party Chair Diane Tebelius (former, as in, when the GOP used to control the Eastside swing turf.)
Putting a cap on a local election where, despite a national Republican wave, Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray won, Democratic U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen won, and the Democrats remained in control of the state legislature, Tebelius conceded last night. The latest count has Hunter up 53.74 to 46.26.
In a victory email to supporters, Hunter, never one to back down, defended the lightning-rod budget (which despite GOP charges of being a tax heavy solution to the financial crisis, mostly relied on cuts and closing loopholes).
“We must balance our need for low taxes with our responsibilities to educate children, provide a functional safety net for the very young, the elderly, and the disabled, and invest in our future as an economic region. It seems to have worked,” Hunter boasted.
6. Local attorney and onetime county prosecutor candidate Bill Sherman is responsible for a PubliCola first: He’s written the first-ever scholarly article to cite PubliCola as a source. Sherman’s forthcoming piece, written for the Pace Law Review, is about the perils of social networking for elected officials. Back in July, we wrote about a Facebook flap between city council member Mike O’Brien and port commissioner John Creighton over the Port’s promise to put $300 million toward the deep-bore tunnel viaduct replacement project. Creighton engaged in a back-and-forth debate with O’Brien about where that money would come from, then erased their conversation, raising questions about transparency.
