Last week's fundraiser for city council candidate Casey Corr, held in a modest conference room at the downtown Bank of California Building, was billed generically as "a discussion regarding the Seattle monorail." But the outcome of the "discussion" was a foregone conclusion: Of the event's 12 sponsors, 10 were prominent monorail opponents, including OnTrack founder Henry Aronson, downtown developers Howard Anderson and Gregory Smith, and Monorail Recall backer Martin Selig—the same folks who have been out to kill the monorail for years; good finance plan or bad.
Corr, who once identified building the monorail as one of his top priorities, changed his mind shortly after the agency's disastrous $11 billion finance plan came out (and, conveniently, after he abandoned the race against monorail foe Richard Conlin to run against prominent monorail supporter Jan Drago). Initially, Corr denied the fundraiser was an OnTrack event, evasively characterizing the list of sponsors as "a bunch of [Downtown Seattle Association] people" in an interview with The Stranger's editorial board. But on Monday, Corr (who also accepted at least $2,300 from donors who supported last year's monorail campaign, including 2002 monorail campaign manager Patrick Kylen and current monorail spokeswoman Natasha Jones) acknowledged the event was primarily sponsored by OnTrack activists.
Robert Rosencrantz, a landlord and geeky good-government activist who's running against incumbent Richard McIver, burned through an astonishing $63,000 in the last seven weeks—$36,000 more than he raised. Most of that total—nearly $49,000—went for cable ads, web design, billboards, mailings, and a poll. Council incumbent Richard Conlin, meanwhile, appears to have adopted a similar spending strategy: Last month, he spent $14,000 more than he raised, causing some observers to wonder why he decided to burn through his campaign stash now, rather than after the September election. Conlin, after all, has just one viable primary challenger—Port Commissioner Paige Miller, who had raised $24,000 by late August. It could be that Conlin is more concerned than he's letting on about Miller, who reportedly led him by seven percentage points in a recent poll.
In a bizarre year-old letter that resurfaced during campaign interviews last month, Port Commissioner Paige Miller excoriated her fellow commissioner Lawrence Molloy, alleging that he had made inappropriate sexual comments to female staffers, suggested that veteran Port employees be "killed," and offered "frequent uninvited comments about [his] views on abortion rights."
Oh, and then there's the matter of the sacrificial ram. According to Miller's letter, Molloy "caused the Commission some embarrassment by [his] efforts to have the Port purchase a lamb for slaughter in a religious ritual."
Molloy says Miller's complaint arose from a misunderstanding over his efforts to bestow a sheep (paid for by him, not the Port) on Muslim employees of Port vendors (most of them taxi drivers and employees of rental-car companies) for Aid al-Adha, a holiday for which Muslims in nations like Morocco, where Molloy once lived, traditionally sacrifice a ram.
Eventually, the plan to sacrifice the ram devolved into general confusion; and ultimately, the ceremony never took place. Molloy says the holiday (in February) was "too close to Christmas." Confusion over whether the sacrificial animal in question was a ram or, instead, a lamb led Miller to suggest it didn't happen "because it wasn't lambing season." And King County Labor Council head Steve Williamson, who says Molloy asked him to "go halfsies" on the ram, says Molloy simply dropped the matter. "I don't know what he had in mind, but my vision was not a sacrifice," Williamson says. "It was simply having a meal."
As for the allegations of inappropriate behavior, Molloy says Miller mischaracterized his comments and made her allegations without knowing all the facts, but adds that he agreed to attend management training classes to learn things like "how to think before you speak." Since then, Miller confirms, "there have been no further incidents."
