Endorsements

Remember how exciting this “voting”
business was last year? Those were the days, huh? We got to vote Barack
Fucking Hussein Goddamn Obama into the White House. We were making
history. Hey, any black lesbian Jews with scary middle names running
for mayor?

Nope.

What do we got instead? A closeted-Republican can of hair spray
outpolling her openly Democratic rivals in the King County executive
race. Two Port of Seattle races so boring that they ought to be
underwritten by Ambien. And the American Chemistry Council pouring $1.3
million into an effort to repeal a sensible city ordinance that would
require supermarkets to charge a small fee for the plastic bags that
strangle baby otters in Puget Sound and cause cancer in burlesque
dancers.

The bag fee will be decided on August 18. Meanwhile, the two leading
candidates in every other race—thanks to our “top two” primary
system—will move on to November’s general election. By voting in
the primary, you can help the best candidates in each race advance and
send the worst candidates packing. For example, in the county executive
race you can vote for a Democrat with the balls to call out the
Republican in the race. And for mayor, you can make sure that someone
who’s different than Greg Nickels—someone like Mike
McGinn—makes it through to the general election and save us from
having to choose between Nickels and Nickels-in-a-Dress in November.
Plus, two of the three city-council races on the primary ballot are up
in the air. So grab your ballot and a bottle—take a shot every
time you read the word “council”—and vote. This election may not
be historic, but your hangover will be.

King County Executive

When you’re going up against a stealth-
Republican like Susan
Hutchison—and, trust us, whichever Democrat gets through the
primary will be going up against her—you need to be willing to
call her what she is: a political lightweight and a partisan extremist;
a shitty fit for the most liberal county in the state; and a
blow-dried, brain-dead, lying, hypocritical, and cowardly piece of
shit.

Dow Constantine, current King County Council chair and former state
legislator, had the balls to say just that. (Except that “piece of
shit” bit—that’s our thoughtful analysis.) It was politically
risky, fraught with the perils of taking on a well-liked former TV
personality and the dangers of going negative early, the kind of thing
that other politicians would have taken a pass on (and did—we’re
looking at you, Larry and Ross). Dow stepped up, took a risk, and
reminded us that he not only has great lefty politics—strong on
the environment, an ally of the local music and club scene, a leader on
transit—but the kind of daring, cunning, and grit required to
beat Hutchison in the November election and keep the county executive’s
chair in Democratic hands.

Which is important, because it’s really, truly,
fucking-frighteningly possible that this county—its protected
lands, its controversial needle-exchange program, its
reproductive-health services—could, after this election, fall
under the control of Hutchison, a woman who gave thousands of dollars
to anti-choice wacko Mike Huckabee, disparaged “evolutionists” this
year at the Governor’s Prayer Breakfast, served as a board member of
the right-wing think tank Discovery Institute, enthusiastically backed
George W. Bush, Dino Rossi, and Dave Reichert, and who has
zero—zero—relevant political experience.

And the shit that pours out Hutchison’s mouth about being a
nonpartisan running in a nonpartisan race for a nonpartisan position?
You know who helped pay to encourage voters to make it a nonpartisan
position last year? Hutchison. Her strategy all along was to hide her
true political colors from the voters. It’s a plan she’s been working
on for a long time, and one that could work. We need an authentic
liberal with a taste for the jugular to take Hutchison out and then
steer the county out of its budget crises and other myriad problems.
That’s Dow Constantine.

King County Council

Position 9

Bev Tonda is a pink-sweatered ray of strawberry sunshine. Bev Tonda
can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile. Every
time Bev Tonda claps her hands, a fairy punches a rapist in the tit.
Bev Tonda is a self-described “Democratic-leaning Republican” who lives
in a log cabin she built with her own teeth on the banks of the Cedar
River and occasionally says the craziest thing ever (“I was
raised Christian, I’m converting to Judaism, and I hang out with
Muslims!!!”). There was no chance the SECB wasn’t going to endorse Bev
Tonda—her opponents are Reagan Dunn, the shriveled weasel who
fell out of Jennifer Dunn, and something called a Mark Greene—but
we really fell in love with her after her hour-long endorsement
meeting, when she e-mailed to let us know that she didn’t fucking want
our endorsement: “I do feel compelled to say that I was not looking for
an endorsement from The Stranger when I came to interview on my
lunch hour. The part-time unpaid intern billed the appointment as an
interview.” Vote for Bev Tonda. Vote the FUCKING SHIT out of her!

Court of Appeals Judge

Position 3

Anne Ellington is the incumbent in this race, and everyone in the
world loves her. Except Robert D. Kelly! He specializes in
personal-injury claims, has a website better suited to a mortician than
a candidate for the appeals court, and thinks he can do a better job.
No one in the hard-nosed business of ranking judicial candidates seems
to agree, and neither do we. (There’s no quid pro quo here, Ms.
Ellington, but should anyone from the SECB ever come before you because
some crooked cop planted dope on a straight-edge Stranger staffer or our publisher finally got arrested for sexting while
driving—just remember your friends at The Stranger,
okay?)

Port Commissioner

Position 3

Port Commissioner

Position 4

You don’t have to read our endorsements in Port of Seattle races.
Seriously. The only thing duller than port races is the Seattle
Channel. (And the only thing duller than the Seattle Channel is
Seattle school-district races.) Do yourself a favor and skip ahead to
our endorsement for mayor, which comes next because that’s the order of
the races on the ballot, which is insane. Interesting races should be
at the top. Anyway…

The port runs the waterfront and Sea-Tac Airport, has a $604 million
annual budget, and oversees 4,000 acres in real estate (nobody knows
how much it’s worth—the port hasn’t appraised it all). It’s
also losing business (down 8 percent in 2009) and is best known for
scandals and lousy performance in state audits. Some hero needs to
march into the port and straighten shit out. But none of this year’s
candidates seems equipped for the job. Some candidates are ideologues,
some are egoists, some are too cozy with commercial real estate, and at
least one candidate is all three. (That’s David Doud, a “top broker” at
Wallace Properties who said he was running because the job “is
synergistic with my career.” However you vote, don’t vote Doud.)

We’re going with Rob Holland (lefty, uniony, big on jobs) and Tom
Albro (an entrepreneur who runs the company that operates the
monorail). Yes, Albro has some Republicans in his closet, but he’s also
got the support of Senator Ed Murray, who met Albro and grilled him
about “choice, the environment, and gay and lesbian issues.” During our
endorsement interview, Albro’s opponent Max Vekich was short on
specifics, long on rhetoric, and occasionally incomprehensible. The
port needs a business-minded person who isn’t evil. That’s Tom Albro.
(We hope.) The port also needs a reliably lefty, union vote. That’s Rob
Holland. (Ditto.)

Mayor

Mayor Greg Nickels has accomplished some things—did you know
that he built light rail with his bare hands? And he has the right idea
about cities—he’s pro-density, for instance. But he has been the
mayor for eight years, he’s not a popular guy, he’s waged a clumsy war
on bars and clubs, and it snowed a lot right before Christmas. Luckily,
there is one person running against Nickels who—unlike all the
rest—offers a real choice and who can prevent it from
snowing in Seattle ever again.

That’s Mike McGinn.

McGinn is the only candidate who disagrees with Nickels about one
very big issue: blowing billions (more than $900 million from the city)
on a tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the aerial freeway on
the waterfront. McGinn points out that we don’t need the tunnel, that
it’s a car-only infrastructure
project with a price tag equal to
every property levy we’re paying now combined, and that Seattle
taxpayers are going to be on the hook for all cost overruns. With the
city in distress in so many other ways (schools, gang violence,
economic development), we can’t afford a tunnel that we don’t need.
Simultaneously, McGinn is the only candidate for mayor who calls
bullshit on nonissues (like everyone’s sudden opposition to the head
tax, which requires businesses to pay $25 for each employee who usually
drives solo to work and helps pay for transportation projects—he
thinks it should stand). He’s got the strongest environmental record.
He’s got the strongest civic résumé among the candidates
who’ve never held elected office (founded the nonprofit Seattle Great
City Initiative, chaired the local Sierra Club). He used to practice
business and employment law. He rides his bike everywhere. He’s
mayor-shaped.

And he’s opposed Mayor Nickels on issues before and won. In 2007, at
the Sierra Club, he led the fight against the ballot initiative that
bundled light-rail funding with highway funding. McGinn argued that if
voters rejected the roads-heavy measure, the light-rail component would
come back to the ballot the next year and win. Nickels argued that this
was our only chance to expand light rail. McGinn was right and Nickels
was wrong: Even though the measure had been polling at 57 percent, the
campaign against it worked, and the following year, funding for just
light rail was on the ballot and passed by a wide margin. And in 2008,
while running Great City, McGinn chaired the campaign for the
parks-improvement levy, which won at the polls, despite the opposition
of Nickels. Unlike Greg Nickels, Jan Drago, James Donaldson, and Joe
Mallahan—the other major contenders in the primary
race—McGinn has no campaign manager and no staff outside of a
scheduler who works five hours a week. His is a volunteer-run
organization, grassroots, of the people. It is the opposite of the
Nickels campaign and the Nickels machine. For the good of the mayor’s
race, for the good of the city, McGinn is the man to challenge Nickels
in the general election.

City Council Position 4

After 16 long years on the city council, Jan Drago is vacating this
seat to run for mayor. Drago has been among the more
conservative—and erratic—voices at City Hall. She’s pushed
for onerous nightlife regulations and a smaller levy to build
affordable housing. Drago also recently said she wants to “establish
and enforce a norm for acceptable and safe behavior on the streets,”
which sounds like the last thing that happens before anti-democracy
tanks come rolling through Westlake Park. If a progressive candidate
takes her place, it will tip the council’s balance leftward.

But the current front-runner and top fundraiser in the race, Sally
Bagshaw, hasn’t demonstrated that she’s more progressive than Drago.
Bagshaw, who worked as an attorney and prosecutor for King County for
over a decade, has contributed to only the council’s more conservative
members in election years. And Bagshaw’s campaign-contribution filing
reports read like a roster of Rainier Club members—and those
people have enough friends at City Hall already. We wanted to like
David Bloom, a cofounder of the Seattle Displacement Coalition, but his
anti-density activism made us fear he would be an advocate against
sensible development. Bloom also told the SECB that he wants to rebuild
or retrofit the viaduct, which is a mind-fuckingly atrocious idea.

Bagshaw and Bloom are not young. And frankly, city council meetings
already look like an AARP bridge club. The city council lost its
younger members, Judy Nicastro and Heidi Wills, back in 2003, and it’s
time for some fresh blood on the council. So we’re throwing our ink
behind Dorsol Plants, a two-tour Iraq war veteran who turns 25 this
month. He’s assembled a battalion of supporters and speaks passionately
about the issues facing the city. He has dozens of smart ideas,
including rewriting neighborhood plans to accommodate more density,
especially around light-rail stations, and supporting targeted human
services to help people avoid losing their homes to foreclosure. Plants
wants to expand alternatives to incarceration for low-level drug
offenders and grow the youth-violence-prevention initiative.

Plants lacks the experience of his competitors, but in the few
months since launching his campaign, he’s demonstrated organizing
skills and the nimble mind required by a city council member. Plants is
also a renter—an unrepresented group on the council—and he
doesn’t own a car, like a lot of people in this city. We think Plants
will be a reliably progressive vote on the council.

City Council Position 6

Did we say we wanted to see fresh blood on the council? We do. We’ve
gushed about Nick Licata before (see almost every issue between 1997
and 2007), but, as he runs for a fourth term, we figured his best years
in politics might be behind him. Licata, a devout lefty with some
latent anti-growth/NIMBY tendencies, has been on the lonely end of
8–1 votes lately, and, in 2002, he fought light rail. So we
listened closely to his primary challenger, Jessie Israel, an employee
of King County Parks and Recreation who says Licata is “bogging things
down” and promised to make Seattle “more livable.”

But some of what we heard from Israel stinks. For example, she said
she was voting for mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, a dud when we met
him, who props his campaign on a thin résumé with
T-Mobile. Israel also supported repealing the bag fee, siding with the
American Chemistry Council, which was bankrolling the pro-pollution
campaign to the tune of $1 million at the time of our meeting. (Israel
reversed her position when the plastic lobby threw another $300,000
into the campaign, calling it a “game changer”—please note,
wealthy corporate interests, that you’ll get a pass from Jessie on the
first $1 million, but then watch out!) Israel talks about change, but
it’s not clear what revolutionary policies she would muscle through the
council.

Licata, on the other hand, has consistently pushed underdog
legislation that the SECB supports. In his most recent term, Licata
created a group to study whether the city could avoid building a new
$200 million jail. The group appears to support diverting low-level,

nonviolent offenders into less expensive, more effective treatment
programs. Licata also fought to provide better public defense for
indigent people in the municipal court system while raising standards
for judges. When considered along with his career on the
council—where he secured funding for pre-arrest diversion
programs, led the first council discussions on reforming drug policy,
and called City Attorney Tom Carr on his bullshit—Licata has
proved to be the strongest council member on issues of civil rights and
smarter criminal justice. He’s also fought against nightlife
restrictions. In addition, in the last few years, he’s passed bills to

provide more workforce housing, increase standards for pedestrian
safety, and get more police on the street.

The issues we disagree with Licata about—sometimes favoring a
less dense city, his idiotic stance on retrofitting the
viaduct—are votes he doesn’t have a shot of winning. But no other
city council member has carried the torches that Licata has carried for
12 years, and neither candidate running against Licata this time
appears ready to pick them up. Licata still has fire in his belly, and
we want to see more.

City Council Position 8

Mike O’Brien, who rode his bike to meet the SECB, has a great ass.
But that’s not the only reason we want to see him on the council. He’s
simultaneously a granola-munching environmentalist (former chair of the
local chapter of the Sierra Club) and a business wizard (got his MBA
from the University of Washington). The combination of idealism and
realism is refreshing, and we think O’Brien’s approaches to increasing
density and transportation represent the sort of forward thinking
Seattle needs more of.

Others in the race didn’t impress us as much. David Miller, while a
strong nightlife advocate, concerned the SECB because his
anti-development fights as past president of the Maple Leaf Community
Council indicated a tendency to support irrational NIMBYs over sensible
city planning. In his meeting with the SECB, Miller was reluctant to
support towers on the Yesler Terrace redevelopment, the best way to
produce more low-income housing in the middle of the city, and was
reticent to endorse infill development outside of prescribed urban
villages. Others in this crowded race ranged from scary (Robert
Rosencrantz wants to “give neighborhoods more authority” over
nightlife) to bland (Jordan Royer loves Greg Nickels and doesn’t
present any particularly interesting ideas).

On the other had, O’Brien supports removing parking requirements
from housing developments, allowing developers to build small
apartments and condos to reduce housing costs, and maintaining the head
tax for pedestrian and bicycle improvements. He believes Seattle must
build much more housing within city limits to combat suburban
sprawl—to reduce the region’s carbon footprint and bring down
housing prices—and we wholeheartedly agree.

Referendum 1 (Bag Fee)

(uphold the disposable-bag fee)

This was a tough one, as both sides made excellent points. On the
one hand, environmentalists who know about things like “science” and
“dead sea mammals” have researched the issue thoroughly and say that
the 20-cent fee on disposable shopping bags—the proceeds of which
go partially to the stores and partially to fund recycling
programs—would help decrease the number of plastic bags currently
piling up in landfills, or being downcycled to shittier plastic bags
and then piling up in landfills, and, eventually, slowly
disintegrating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch until they resemble
tiny, delicious plankton particles that fish mistake for food but are
actually POISON.

On the other hand, plastic-bag companies want more money!
Waaaaaaaah!!! Do you want to see plastic-bag companies and chemical
corporations cry? ON THEIR BIRTHDAY!?

Despite compelling arguments from the staggeringly disingenuous
anti-bag-fee spokesman, whose organization, the Coalition to Stop the
Seattle Bag Tax, has raised an absurd million-plus dollars from
chemical companies and trade associations like the American Chemistry
Council (but “one guy in Ballard gave $25!” he told us), we decided to
go ahead and endorse a “YES, FUCKING OBVIOUSLY” vote on upholding the
bag fee. Because 20 cents is approximately the same as zero cents if
you remember to bring a reusable bag to the store anyway, which people
who don’t want to pay the fee will do, and we’d like to continue having
oceans, thanks.

Seattle School Board

District 5

This race pits incumbent Mary Bass, the dissident board member who
fought against the school-closure plan and a longtime advocate for the
needs of Central District families, against several challengers who say
Bass has become too dissident—and ineffectual—for her
district’s good. While we’ve supported Bass in the past, her
challengers are right. Bass lost the school-closure fight, which was a
familiar experience for her—in the right, but without enough
votes from fellow board members to win. Enter Kay Smith-Blum, co-owner
of the “European specialty store” Butch Blum, longtime
do-gooder-about-schools (creating and raising hundreds of thousands of
dollars for public-school “annual funds,” for example). Smith-Blum is
exactly as crazy as you’d expect for someone who really, really wants
to dive into endless collective decision-making about chronic,
incredibly knotty public-school problems.

A person has to be crazy—or Cheryl Chow—to want to serve
on the school board. But while Bass is ha-ha-wince-whatever crazy,
Smith-Blum is
holy-shit-she’s-probably-right-and-she’s-going-to-chew-my-face-off-if-I-disagree-with-her
crazy. And that fresh brand of crazy—plus Smith-Blum’s mind for
spreadsheets and track record of strong public-school advocacy—is
just what this position needs.

Full disclosure: Smith-Blum owns a business that advertises in
The Stranger. The SECB does not take advertising into
consideration when making endorsements. If we did, we’d have to endorse
a lot of local she-male escorts.

Seattle School Board

District 7

This race came down to two qualified candidates: Betty Patu, a
three-decade veteran teacher in Seattle schools, and Charlie Mas,
wonkiest wonk of all school-district wonky-wonks. Mas, who maintains a
creepily obsessive school-board blog, is clearly well-versed and
interested in the überboring intricacies of school-board
bureaucracy. But Patu—currently a teacher at Rainier
Beach—has that rock-solid, unflappable gravitas that comes with
sitting behind a public-high-school desk for 30 years, as well as a
concrete understanding of what works and what’s bullshit in Seattle
Public Schools politics, and a commitment to underrepresented
minorities like Asian/Pacific Islanders. Best of all, she’s
hard-fucking-core. In her endorsement meeting, Patu—in the
context of an anecdote about personally connecting with
students—told the SECB that she once talked down a former student
who was holding another student at gunpoint. “Give me that gun,” she
barked, barely blinking. Betty Patu, we will literally do anything you
say. Just please don’t cut us.