The Stranger's Endorsements for the November 2015 General Election!
by The Stranger Election Control Board
What the fuck is a pangolin?
Of all the questions the Stranger Election Control Board has had to ask itself over these many years—questions like "Is 1:30 p.m. too early to have a drink if you're already stoned?" and "Why does The Stranger conference room have carpet on the walls?" and the perennial "What went so wrong with these people's lives that they want to run for school board?"—we'd never yet had to ask ourselves about pangolins. Until this year.
Because this year, it's apparently not enough that we're voting on every seat on the Seattle City Council; some important local measures addressing transportation, campaign finance reform, and police accountability; the latest Tim Eyman bullshit; the race for King County ASSe$$or; and several races for the motherfucking school board. This year, thanks to Paul Allen's vast wealth, we're also voting on whether we like pangolins enough—and we'll admit, they are cute little termite-eating mammals—to create a new statewide law so that Paul Allen can stop freaking out about threatened species that are not even native to Washington State and maybe start focusing on our state's threatened workers, renters, and school kids.
It's enough to make us want to curl up into small, impenetrable balls and point our scales outward—like a pangolin—and ignore the politicians who come into our office seeking the SECB's prized and priceless endorsement. But since we can't do that, it remains our job (and yours!) to make some decisions. It's election time, people. We're all going to have to put down our bongs, pull up our pants, and push away from the Tumblr porn long enough to vote. Stop daydreaming about whether that water they found on Mars is drinkable and how you can get there. It's not, and you can't. Go find your ballot. (Hint: It's in your actual, physical mailbox.) And then join us in casting a couple dozen votes. Seriously, it's only a couple dozen votes, and this shit is important. We have pangolins—not to mention a city, a county, a state, and a planet—to save.
STATE
Initiative Measure No. 1366
No
Tim Eyman is a skid mark that just won't fade in a state that can't afford new underwear because Tim Eyman bankrupted it. And Initiative 1366 is Eyman's latest craptastic offering. Just knowing Eyman's name is behind this thing is probably enough for you to stop reading this endorsement right here and vote HELLLLLL FUCKING NO. But in case you're one of those annoying "thoughtful and conscientious" voters who needs reasons: Eyman's current con is really an attempt at winning a battle he lost more than two goddamn years ago, when the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that an ancient Eyman initiative that required a two-thirds legislative majority for any tax increases was unconstitutional. (Not the first Eyman initiative to have been found unconstitutional, not the last.) This year's bullshit Eyman measure tries to blackmail the state legislature into passing a constitutional amendment that would allow two-thirds majority requirements. That's right: This motherfucker was found to be peddling unconstitutional bullshit with his two-thirds majority nonsense, and instead of going home and thinking about his sorry ass, his solution is to just change the constitution. Under this new Eyman initiative, if the legislature fails to pass the constitutional amendment Eyman wants for himself, our state sales tax—which is the main sources of funding for basic state services here in Washington—gets cut in a big way. In other words: "Waaaaaa! Give me my unconstitutional tax-slashing measure back or I'll slash money for food assistance and health care for people who desperately need it." Fuuuuuuuck you, Tim Eyman. We hope the state attorney general follows the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission's recent recommendations and prosecutes your shady self to the fullest. Vote no.
Initiative Measure No. 1401
Yes
The largest donor to this statewide initiative—by far—is Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Because it turns out Paul Allen likes endangered animals. Like, a lot. And so he's put up nearly $3 million to make sure we're all voting this year on a measure that would crack down on people in Washington who traffic in the dead body parts of elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, lions, leopards, cheetahs, marine turtles, sharks, rays, and pangolins. (PANGOLINS! GOOGLE THEM! YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED!) To which we say: Okaaaaaaaay, Paul. We like pangolins, too. (Seriously, google them. They are adorable, and the SECB will taxidermy the head of anyone who tries to sell us the dead body parts of one.) However. As noted above, it's crazy easy for one man to use this state's initiative process to pursue his own private fancies. Eyman's been doing this to no-good ends for what seems like our entire lives—and some of our past lives. And with Paul Allen playing the Eyman game to save pangolins, we can't help but think: Um, Paul, could you put $3 million behind a statewide initiative that would help the HUMANS of Washington State? We know you donated $100,000 to defeat a 2010 initiative that would have given us a badly need income tax here in Washington. (Right now, Washington has the most regressive tax structure in the nation because it relies mainly on the sales tax, which means people like Paul Allen don't pay their fair share to make this state run smoothly and assure basic human needs are met.) Still, if you don't like the income-tax idea, Paul, could you wrap your pangolin-obsessed head around some other human-helping statewide proposal that might help? Something to fund our unconstitutionally underfunded public school system, perhaps? Maybe a $1 billion annual excise tax on the existence of Tim Eyman? You really do owe us one, Paul. Vote yes.
Advisory Vote Nos.
10, 11, 12, and 13
Maintained
An advisory vote is a vote that doesn't matter at all. And who do we have to thank for these bullshit check boxes? That skid mark Tim Eyman, that's who. So these bullshit votes are nonbinding and we have to go through these bullshit motions only because Eyman wanted to harangue people every time our democratically elected legislature democratically approved anything that might result in the state having a little bit more money to spend. Advisory Vote No. 10 requires railroads transporting highly flammable crude oil tankers to be more transparent and show they can pay for a spill. No. 11 deals with merging the medical and recreational marijuana systems and has legitimate flaws, but is also way too complicated to get into for one of these bullshit Eyman advisory votes. No. 12 is the revenue bill from the state's $16.1 billion transportation package, which simultaneously authorizes this region to ask voters for up to $15 billion for the Sound Transit 3 expansion and invests heavily in highways and car infrastructure. And No. 13 is a bill that ended a Microsoft tax break. Vote maintained on all of them, because fuuuuuuck you, Tim Eyman.
KING COUNTY
Charter Amendment No. 1
Yes
King County is threatened by thuggish armed gangs seeking to enrich themselves and operate with impunity: friggin' police unions. Charter Amendment No. 1 gives you the chance to strike a blow against that impunity by voting for expanded civilian oversight of the King County Sheriff's department. The county's Office of Law Enforcement Oversight needs to be empowered to investigate misconduct, says King County Council member Larry Phillips, because "the police guild has made it very difficult for anybody at King County to get anything done." (Brace yourselves for a choice cop joke.) This amendment, if passed, lets the county's labor negotiators say to the guild that represents sheriff's deputies: "Hey. Put down the doughnuts for a second. The public is with us. Stop holding up progress." (Bet you didn't see a doughnut joke coming, huh? HA HA. HA! Doughnuts.) The amendment would also create a committee of civilians to advise the sheriff and county council on matters of "equity and social justice" related to policing. If you agree that #BlackLivesMatter—and fuck you if you don't—you'll join Sheriff John Urquhart and eight of the nine county council members in supporting this charter amendment. You can help make sure that bad police officers can't get away with quite so much racist, brutal, stupid bullshit. (And no, unfortunately, this will not apply to the Seattle Police Department, which is separate from the King County Sheriff. We sure wish it did, because the Seattle Police Officers' Guild is a garbage organization whose core function is to circle the wagons around terrible cops.) Vote yes.
Proposition No. 1
Approved
This is probably the most important measure you'll vote on this election season. Of course, this ass-backward world being what it is, it's also the measure you've likely heard the least about. It's being pushed by King County executive Dow Constantine, and it's known as "Best Starts for Kids" because—spoiler alert—it invests a bunch of money in providing a better start in life to those kids who get a hard draw in the birth lottery. If this sounds like a nice-but-maybe-expensive thing to do for your less-fortunate neighbors, check yourself. Yes, it's a nice thing to do, but it's also a great way of saving your own precious tax dollars in the long run, you stingy fuck. That's because a lot of your precious tax dollars are now spent—to pick just one pricey example—on incarcerating kids who got a very bad start in life. As Constantine puts it: "You pay dearly for the pound of cure, for want of an ounce of prevention." So he wants you to approve $65 million a year over six years in new property taxes—stop whining, that works out to only about $56 per year for the average King County property owner, you stingy fuck—in order to fund early childhood interventions. Things like helping needy first-time moms with nutrition, medical care, a safe place to have their child, and nurses who visit the new family to help assure the new child has a decent (not deluxe, just decent, you stingy fuck) first two years of life. Science shows that the more healthy and nurturing a child's first two years of life are, the less likely that child is to become—and these are now our words here, not the scientific litracha's—a fuckup who costs the rest of society dearly (in terms of expensive crisis interventions, hospitalizations, drug rehabilitations, and so on). There will still be fuckups in the world even if we pass this measure. And if history is any guide, a number of them will wind up on the SECB. Still, how about we spend some public money on trying to create fewer predestined fuckups, rather than, as Constantine puts it, spending the vast majority of our county's public dollars on "just trying to keep the house of cards standing"? Vote approved.
ASSe$$or
John Wilson
Interviewing county tax assessor candidates? How the fuck were we going to stay awake for that? So the SECB broke into Savage's cocaine drawer before this one. And while cocaine is bad for you and no one should do it—except for Savage, who tells us he has a medical cocaine license—we're sure glad we! Did the! Cocaine! Because thanks to our EYES WIDE AWAKE state we could see that the challenger in this race, John Wilson, is the cool dad we wish we had growing up, the kind of dad whose adult kids would stay off drugs and the SECB. His guilty pleasure is yelling at his HGTV, he came in wearing a striped shirt with spotted purple lining on the inside of the collar, and he's seriously into iPads (like, so seriously into them that it seems that a dispute between him and current King County assessor, Lloyd Hara, over a goddamn iPad app is what caused Wilson to decide to run against his former-boss-turned-political-nemesis in the first place).
Wilson worked under Hara for years, so he knows how the tax assessor's office works (which is great, because fuck if we do). He even admitted that a lot of what the office does could be automated and done by robots (and iPads). Points for honesty! Hara, on the other hand, canceled with the SECB at the last second. What did he do when he was on the job? He asked the county council for a raise, which would have made him the highest-paid tax assessor in the state (they declined to give him one). Wilson thinks the current $163K in salary for our elected tax assessor is plenty. And, most excitingly, he's pledged to be an "activist assessor." He's concerned about rising property taxes (he wouldn't have raised the property assessed value ratio, he said, unlike Hara), he has good ideas on how the county tax assessor can help create more affordable housing, he promises to make sure chronic tax evaders like Microsoft pay their fair share, and he talked a good game about creating "tax equity across the board." That's what we want to hear. Want more of the status quo? Hara is your guy. Want change? Vote Wilson. (Want a medical cocaine license? Ask Savage.)
Director of Elections
Julie Wise
It's dumb as shit that we elect the director of King County Elections. The SECB called this whole electing-our-elections-director idea "stupid" back in 2007, but the voters defied the will of the SECB, and so today we elect people to this post—and even today, electing people to this post remains a stupid fucking idea. This is a job that calls for a hired technocrat who's willing to piss some people off sometimes, not a crowd-pleasing, glad-handing politician. Fortunately, Julie Wise, who's been with the elections department for 13 years and is now its deputy director, is basically a technocrat in political drag. She tells us she's "in love with elections," and we believe her. You'd have to be to toil away in the department of electionszzzzzzz.... Sorry, we fell asleep for a week trying to finish that sentence. State legislator Zack Hudgins, an actual politician, is talking up a lot of supposed failings on the part of King County Elections and laying them all—politician style—at Wise's feet while calling for new leadership. But Wise agrees with Hudgins that we need a lot more ballot drop boxes in King County and that we should do whatever we can to get them. (The King County Council would need to allocate the funds to make that happen.) And Hudgins should know that low voter turnout, which he's been blaming Wise for, is not just the fault of the elections department. It's also the fault of politicians in Olympia—like Hudgins—who year after year fail to fix the biggest problems in this state (like, say, our unconstitutionally underfunded public school system) and thereby cause people to lose faith in the electoral process. Vote Wise.
County Council District No. 4
Jeanne Kohl-Welles
As a state senator down in Olympia, JKW was a good, solid Democrat. But JKW will have to step that lefty shit up if she's going to be on the King County Council. Being a good progressive in King County means being further left than what we expected of you in the morally bankrupt, right-tilting state legislature.
In Olympia, Kohl-Welles worked on issues we care about like marijuana and paid parental leave, but she has also depended on deeply flawed anti-sex-work "research" to defend her belief that sex buying should stay criminalized instead of fighting to empower sex workers with labor rights. King County is a place with all the affordability issues Seattle is facing, plus a huge responsibility for funding the local criminal justice system, plus a budget that we've reported looks like "a slasher film." Despite all that, SECB members were sleep-drooling on the conference table while Kohl-Welles tried to explain even one concrete idea for what she would do at the county.
Don't get us wrong. You still have to vote for Jeanne Kohl-Welles in this race. Her opponent is some rabidly anti-tax nobody who told us he knows his campaign is "hopeless." But you don't have to like it. And once the notorious JKW gets into office, you're welcome to send her as many angry e-mails as your little fingers can type demanding she be a better, bolder, louder progressive now that she's working closer to home. Vote Kohl-Welles.
County Council District No. 6
Claudia Balducci
Jane? JAAAANE!!! The SECB e-mailed Republican incumbent Jane Hague eight times to see if she'd come in for an interview or at least send us some basic campaign materials, but Hague did not show up and she did not send us squat. This appears to be consistent with her previous dealings with the SECB. In 2011, we wrote before the primary that Hague is "a boozy, allegedly-cop-abusing, reportedly-degree-inflating shopaholic who lives in Bellevue Square and has spent 17 years on the county council... Or so we're told. Hague wouldn't meet with the SECB or return our phone calls." We still can't figure out why Hague won't call us back. (Maybe it's because we then called her a "Republican train wreck" ahead of the 2011 general?) But this type of behavior also appears to be consistent with the biggest criticism of Hague from her opponents—that she doesn't show up to King County Council meetings, either. Of all the missed votes by county council members in the last year, more than 40 percent were by Hague.
Claudia Balducci, the Democratic mayor of Bellevue who wants to represent the Eastside, came in and won us over with her advocacy for light rail (she sits on the Sound Transit board) and had some pretty cool ideas about coming up with a regional affordable housing plan. It might raise some people's hackles that Balducci, who used to direct King County jails, also helped shepherd through King County's controversial—but voter approved—plan to rebuild the decrepit Children and Family Justice Center (aka juvie, aka "youth jail" if you're protesting it). But Balducci says she's learned from the experience, and the activism, and now thinks the long-term goal of zero detention for youth is "absolutely the right direction." We're holding you to that goal, Balducci, and obviously professional GOP train wreck Jane Hague needs more free time so she can start returning our phone calls. Vote Balducci.
PORT OF SEATTLE
Commissioner Position No. 2
Courtney Gregoire
You wise-asses must think you're real funny. More than 23,000 of you voted in the primary for Goodspaceguy, a perennial candidate who, by his own estimation, has lost at least 15 local races and HATES THE MINIMUM WAGE. No, not just $15. He doesn't think a minimum wage—any minimum wage—should exist. Do you want to burn it all down? All of it? Seriously, don't try to burn it all down just for the fun of watching Goodspaceguy light the match. There's actually a lot at stake here. The port—which controls much of the waterfront and the airport—is subsidized by our property tax base (the port collected $72.9 million in King County property taxes in 2014) and directly employed 129,744 people last year. The port also supports a lot of carbon-intensive projects at a time when the city, the state, and the country are making moves to wean off fossil fuels. How do we transition to a renewable economy fairly? And what role can the port play in creating green jobs during that transition? It's more important than ever that the public is able to participate in the port commission's sham of a representative democracy—and that the port pay more than lip service to fair wages, equal opportunities for people of color working as airport vendors, and to the environment. PAY ATTENTION, PEOPLE. We don't think Courtney Gregoire is perfect, but she's got a decent set of progressive values and she swears she learned from her mistakes in not matching her actions with her rhetoric during the Shell oil rig debacle. Honestly, she's probably the best port commissioner we've got right now. Okay, that bar isn't set very high, but still. Vote Gregoire.
Commissioner Position No. 5
Fred Felleman
We were curious—really curious—as to what might happen after fisheries biologist Fred Felleman and former Normandy Park city council member Marion Yoshino made it through the primaries. Both pretty much ran on environmental and transparency platforms, both were considered underdogs in the race, and both unexpectedly beat the maritime industry and Alaska Airlines' favored candidate. Quelle surprise! So who would Big Maritime and Big Airline back in the general election? Welp, Alaska Airlines ended up donating $1,000 to Yoshino's campaign, and now Yoshino has pulled back—very far back—from her original platform. When asked in August why she thought she won the primary, Yoshino wrote that it was because people recognized that "CLIMATE CHANGE MATTERS." But by late September,
Yoshino was telling conservative radio host John Carlson that the Shell controversy had scared business away from the port. (Yoshino cited conversations with maritime executives as evidence of this.) Yoshino also said she was proud to represent the business community. "I think we all know that what the port needs is not more union[s]," Yoshino said. "The port needs to move business forward." Yeesh. Looks like Yoshino's made her true allegiances to the port's typical big business overlords clear. Fuck that. Vote Felleman.
CITY OF SEATTLE
Council District No. 1
Lisa Herbold
In writing their completely wrong endorsement in this race, whoever is Weekend-at-Bernie's-ing the members of the Seattle Times editorial board these days praised Shannon Braddock as someone who's "not beholden to the uber-left surge." Well, hey there everyone, we are the motherfucking "uber-left surge" and we want Lisa Herbold.
Herbold has worked in Council Member Nick Licata's office since whenever Licata moved all of his lava lamps into City Hall and refused to leave. Since then, Licata has sometimes let us down on density and transportation issues—and we'll be watching Herbold on those issues, too—but his office, thanks in huge part to Herbold, has made important things happen for vulnerable people in this city. They've supported homeless encampments, led the city's paid sick and safe time ordinance, and been some of the most aggressive watchdogs in city hall making sure Seattle's labor laws actually get enforced.
Herbold supports basically every single thing that's good for renters and low-wage workers—caps on move-in fees, protection from discrimination if you pay your rent with public assistance, the right to sue your employer if they're not paying you the right wage, bargaining rights for Uber drivers. Meanwhile, the Rental Housing Association's political arm, which has donated to Braddock, wrote an e-mail to its members urging them to oppose Herbold because she is "known to strongly favor tenants." Over here on the "uber-left," that's music to our ears. Vote Herbold.
Council District No. 2
Tammy Morales
Yes, it's true, we endorsed incumbent Bruce Harrell in the primary. We fucked up. Back in August, Harrell challenger Tammy Morales clearly hadn't hit her stride, so we went with the guy who already held the office—even though the SECB had never endorsed Harrell before, and even though we were looking for some reason, any reason, to endorse Harrell's opponent. We were high? Probably. Also, we were worried about Morales's lack of specifics and told ourselves Harrell would be a better council member in the new districts system, in which he'd be responsible only to South Seattle rather than the whole city. Like we said, we fucked up.
Since we met with Harrell and Morales this summer, Morales has come forward with clear criticisms of Harrell's lack of accomplishments during his eight years on the council, as well as her own specific promises about what she'd do differently. Why she didn't have more of this in the summer, we don't know. But she's right when she now suggests, on the campaign trail, that Harrell often operates like a spineless panderer who's more interested in advancing his own political career than in any real moral compass he may or may not possess. And just in the last couple of weeks, Harrell betrayed his own weasely stupidity with some true bullshit, crystallizing for the SECB that while Morales has gotten much better as a candidate since the primary election, Harrell has somehow gotten worse.
On October 9, we found out that Harrell wanted to proclaim an Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month in Seattle—and that the proclamation would be made available for his council colleagues' signatures on Indigenous Peoples' Day. The draft of the proclamation sent to other council members used colonialist language that celebrated the racist mass-murderer Christopher Columbus by name. This was an offensive and tone-deaf move that Harrell backtracked from quickly, and he didn't end up introducing the proclamation on Indigenous Peoples' Day. Still, it was a window into the kind of politician he is. A group of Italian Americans come to him asking for recognition for their holiday and—poof—a proclamation gets sent to the rest of the council in an attempt to score easy political points without thinking critically about what the proclamation actually says. Then, when he's challenged on the timing, he tells a reporter that he was "the drafter of Indigenous Peoples' Day." Which just isn't true. (Harrell was a cosponsor of Indigenous Peoples' Day, not the drafter.) This was classic Harrell: thoughtlessly pandering and taking credit for shit he didn't do all at once.
A few days before, Harrell did the same thing on municipal broadband. At a debate in District 2, Morales spoke in support of a municipal broadband pilot project, possibly on Beacon Hill. "It was my idea," Harrell said twice in response. No it fucking wasn't, Bruce. The recommendation came from the last city study on municipal broadband. Harrell is openly skeptical of the cost of the city running broadband service. If he supports municipal broadband at all, it's lukewarm support at best—he's tight with CenturyLink, having worked as their lawyer, and received a campaign donation from Comcast this year. In any case, a municipal broadband pilot project certainly wasn't his idea. (He and Murray have advocated for a pilot project that would help private broadband companies, not anything that would help create city-run public broadband.)
All of which underlines the basic problem with Harrell: He doesn't have a solid set of progressive political values that he goes to the mat for every day. It's more like an endlessly malleable hodgepodge of conflicting promises, made in different rooms to different people and rooted in political expediency. Which is why he has precious little to show for the eight years he's been on the council. (We loved his "banning the box" legislation, which outlawed questions about criminal records on job applications in an attempt to combat hiring discrimination against people of color, who are disproportionately jailed in this country. But we expect a lot more over eight years, particularly since Harrell has known for the last two years that with district elections coming, he'd probably have to run this year for a seat representing South Seattle—which clearly deserves a lot more from Harrell and the city.) Bottom line: Harrell is a big guy who can project a lot of charisma in public appearances—but behind the scenes, he sways like a beanpole in whatever direction he thinks the political winds are blowing. He openly prides himself on being the "swing vote," as if that's a good thing. We disagree. We want elected officials who govern based on clear values, not just whatever they think is going to look best for them in that particular moment.
Plus, Harrell gets a lot of shit dead wrong: He supports the motherfucking tunnel boondoggle; as public safety chair, he hasn't done serious oversight of the police (uh, our news section has been doing that for him); and he stood with the mayor in a misguided and ultimately failed crackdown on hookah lounges.
Tammy Morales doesn't hold a candle to Harrell in the charisma department. We'll give him that. But on the issues that count, Morales has shown that she's a firebrand progressive. She's endorsed by the Sierra Club. She's pledged to push for less-regressive forms of taxation, municipal broadband, and more aggressive police reform. She wants to put a stop to move-in discounts for tech employees and supports capping move-in fees for tenants. We're eager to see her marry her rock-solid principles with her community planning and food-justice background while on the council, and we think she'd be a great addition to an insurgent, solidly progressive slate that includes Lisa Herbold (District 1), Kshama Sawant (District 3), Michael Maddux (District 4), Debora Juarez (District 5), and Jon Grant (citywide). And, in case it's not clear already: We are so fucking sick of Harrell's weaseling. Vote Morales.
Council District No. 3
Kshama Sawant
Socialist Kshama Sawant won 52 percent of the primary vote and she's raised more money—tons from small donors—than any other candidate for city council. So trolls can shut the fuck up now about Sawant being some fringe fluke. Sawant does a better job of loudly articulating the problems facing Seattle's low-wage, formerly-middle class, and hanging-on-to-the-middle-class-by-their-fingernails workers than anyone else in city government, period. Even if you're not on board with her long-term vision for a socialist paradise spreading outward from Seattle, you can still get behind the righteous shit she talks about the corporate influence in our politics, the flaws in our police-accountability system, and the need for elected officials to focus their work on the problems of average citizens—not just on the powerful and wealthy few who already have access to the corridors of power.
Yeah, Sawant can be uncompromising with her rhetoric, and her take-no-prisoners style has caused establishment panties to permanently bunch. So what? Her tactic of staking out a far-left "fringe" position and then pulling the bunched-panties crowd toward it by any means necessary is working. (See, for example, the city's historic $15 minimum wage law and this year's council resolution calling on Olympia to lift the ban on rent control.) Sawant's critics—Council President Tim Burgess chief among them—will say that she hasn't actually passed any significant legislation and is all fiery flash with no substance. Not true. Sawant's version of a rent-control resolution didn't pass the council because Burgess, trying to neutralize a potent election year issue that could help Sawant win, put forward his own, less-confrontationally-worded resolution. It passed instead of Sawant's, but that's still a victory for Sawant's pull-'em-to-the-left strategy—not least because Burgess doesn't actually support rent control.
Pamela Banks, Sawant's establishment-backed challenger, has some good ideas but lacks anything close to Sawant's sense of urgency about the problems that continue to haunt this fast-changing city. And they are fucking urgent problems. Sawant's recent decision to piss off the likes of Joel Connelly by skipping a downtown Rotary Club debate for a protest against a Columbia City "slumlord" shows she gets that urgency, and if she can be at every big protest while also rope-a-dope-ing Burgess into backing a rent-control resolution in her first term in office (which, clearly, she can) then we can't wait to see what happens in her next term. Mayor Ed Murray endorsing Bernie Sanders? Sally Bagshaw turning her plane into a flying homeless shelter? Whatever goes down, you can be sure they'll say it has nothing to do with Sawant. And when they say that, you can be sure it has a lot to do with her. Vote Sawant.
Council District No. 4
Michael Maddux
Praise be to the new city council districts system. While there was something kinda fun about watching Jean Godden run a campaign by refusing to answer questions and alienating young people, we've been rolling every night since she lost the primary election. (If you're wondering whether that's a drug reference, it is.)
Both Michael Maddux and Rob Johnson, the two dudes who made it through to the general, are more progressive than Godden. So now this race is about exactly what shade of progressive Seattle wants to be. Transit advocate Rob Johnson is an establishment environmentalist with a real Mormon missionary vibe. He is generally decent on the Big Issues, but he hasn't convinced us he'd be willing to stand up to the mayor or a more conservative council majority. The kind of incremental, lukewarm, go-along-to-get-along bullshit Johnson represents is part of what has gotten Seattle to where it is—still talking about maybe someday doing something about mass transit while shredding $100 bills to fill Bertha's rescue pit.
Michael Maddux is the opposite of all that. Sure, Maddux might have a secret anger problem, and we still don't believe he doesn't know what a quaalude is. But in our mind, that just makes him one of the normals—a gay single dad, a paralegal, and a parks activist who's unequivocally supportive of social services and has one of the best gender pay equity platforms in this whole general election cycle. That's normal, right? Maddux is interested in both greater density and making sure that density is affordable. (Yes, you can do both, free-marketers!) He talks—and talks—about ways to fix our regressive tax system by passing some sort of local income tax and letting opponents sue the city. If we won in court, Maddux says, that could "blow the lid off" tax policy in this state. Will it work? Hell if we know, but we need someone in there who'll try. Vote for Maddux twice.
Council District No. 5
Debora Juarez
When former King County Superior Court judge and lawyer Debora Juarez showed up to The Stranger's endorsement interview with a fat binder full of notes and confidently, lengthily answered questions about police reform, we were impressed. That said, we almost choked on our blunts when we heard that Juarez gave the calcified dentures at the Seattle Times editorial board a very dodgy, very lawyerly answer about Shell's presence in Seattle. Apparently, that answer tickled their ball hairs enough for an endorsement. Well, here's the thing: OUR genital hairs respond to more than just talk about the Shell issue (unlike the Seattle Times editorial board's), and we admire (and are putting our faith in) Juarez's history of tribal sovereignty activism—activism that continues to shift the fundamental power dynamics behind some of our most pressing social and environmental issues. Juarez, a member of the Blackfeet tribe who grew up in poverty on the Puyallup Reservation, again unleashed an activist-like side when she told The C Is for Crank's Erica C. Barnett that she was disappointed to see giant toddler Mayor Ed Murray stumble back from his Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda report's language around increasing multifamily housing in single-family zones. The report's discussion of racist zoning covenants caused particular uproar among pearl-clutchers who claimed Seattle's legacy of racism and single-family zoning were unrelated. "I think the white community is starting to realize this system and this constitution and this democracy were made for them," Juarez told Barnett. Juarez's opponent Sandy Brown—a pro-gay-marriage (that's done, dude), pro-gun-control (yep, that still needs doing) pastor—seems like a decent pamphlet progressive and a telegenic guy, but we haven't heard him go deep on the issues in the same type-A, fat-binder way that Juarez has. Another thing: Juarez's personal experience with housing instability and institutional racism would add necessary perspective on the city council, and Juarez doesn't seem afraid of a fight. The Low Income Housing Institute's Mercedes Elizalde and Planned Parenthood's Halei Watkins threw their support behind Juarez after they dropped out of the same District 5 race, and they are smart as hell. Vote Juarez.
Council District No. 6
Mike O'Brien
Since we're already in that dark part of the endorsements in which we start imagining the wiry gray ball hairs on people at the Seattle Times, we might as well tell you another thing we imagine: Frank Blethen, the arch-conservative Seattle Times publisher, splooging all over his desk whenever his editorial board whines about Mike O'Brien being too "ideological." It seems like a fetish over there, but hey, if that's your thing, whatever. Everyone else loves Mike O'Brien—for standing with unions, for his kayaktivism against Shell, for pushing developers to pay for affordable housing, and for recently passing a resolution to stop the incarceration of juveniles in Seattle. Plus, he's got a fabulous mop of hair, rides his big bike everywhere, and is always smiling. Not the fake, teeth-gritted "Fuck, I wish I was lounging in my condo right now" smile you expect from politicians. Like, smiling is literally Mike's way of being. In our primary endorsement, we told him to drop all the niceties and go fuck somebody up. And what do you know? He took on Travis Kalanick, the $6 billion net-worth libertarian douche-bro CEO of Uber, by introducing legislation that's the first of its kind in the country to allow Uber drivers—who complain of low pay and no recourse when the company mistreats them—to unionize. O'Brien's challenger, Catherine Weatbrook, is running as a NIMBY. And the Times is so desperate to unseat O'Brien that they went from dismissing Weatbrook as less than credible during the primary to full-throatedly endorsing her for the November general. Yeah, yeah, we know, when it comes to District 2, the SECB went from dismissing Tammy Morales in the primary to full-throatedly endorsing her for the November general. But Tammy Morales is not Catherine Weatbrook. Morales has actual exciting ideas and shit. In contrast, Weatbrook's entire campaign basically goes like this: "I WILL FILL THE POTHOLES! MIKE HASN'T FILLED THE POTHOLES! I WILL FILL THEM!" Even if Weatbrook personally mixed Frank Blethen's splooge and his editorial board's wiry gray ball hairs into an environmentally sustainable, concrete-like substance that could be used to fill all the potholes in this city, we still wouldn't trust her NIMBY nonsense. Vote O'Brien.
Council District No. 7
Sally Bagshaw
Challenger Deborah Zech Artis dissed the SECB during the primary election by picking a video voters guide taping over her meeting with us. Yeah, we were pissed, but we took a long nap, got over it, watched Artis's video statement while sucking on a pot lozenge and paying verrry close attention, and during that very important two minutes we saw nothing that would make us pick her over incumbent Sally Bagshaw. EVEN THOUGH incumbent Sally Bagshaw does deserve to face a serious challenge to her district-elections-hating, downtown-tunnel-humping self. (Confidential to primary loser Gus Hartmann: We are not talking about you. No more city council elections for you, big guy. Have fun at Google, and thanks for the hate-balloons and hate-chocolates.) As for Bagshaw: We'd like to see her do something real for affordable housing in her next term, rather than spending so much time coming up with nonanswers to our very direct questions about how much developers should be paying in linkage fees. Pop a pot lozenge and vote Bagshaw.
Council Position No. 8
Jon Grant
In our endorsement for the August primary, we compared Council President Tim Burgess to Tywin Lannister—the calculating, cold-blooded schemer behind the Iron Throne from the hit show Game of Thrones. This resonated. When Crosscut asked him about it, Burgess said, "They [the SECB] called me a condescending asshole. I asked my wife, 'Do you think I'm a condescending asshole?' She said, 'Well, sometimes.'"
Since August, Burgess has done some good stuff: He passed a tax on gun ammunition that's infuriated the NRA and, trying to outmaneuver Kshama Sawant, passed a council resolution calling for the repeal of the state's ban on rent control. What could possibly explain his shifting positions? Oh, right. It's an election year. Burgess remains a steadfast supporter of the Highway 99 tunnel boondoggle, but he's moving to the left on other issues in an attempt to defuse the candidacy of Jon Grant, who pulled a surprisingly strong 30 percent of the vote in the primary despite being totally outgunned in campaign contributions. Grant is a progressive nerd on all the big issues, including racial justice, police reform, and, perhaps most importantly, housing affordability—he's the former executive director of the Tenants Union of Washington State, which does yeoman's work advocating for vulnerable renters. So are you sick of astronomical rents? Want a roof over your head rather than a tent next to a freeway off-ramp? Want to not be treated like a criminal for living in that tent? You want Grant. (And you should know that Burgess opposed letting homeless people form encampments on city land, where they can band together and get social services, until very recently.) Tywin Lannister was an asshole, but at least he was consistent. Burgess, now desperately trying to pretend he's a liberal, lacks the courage of his own conservative villainy. ABB: Anyone but Burgess. Vote Grant.
Council Position No. 9
Lorena González
Bill Bradburd is a condescending, obstructionist NIMBY creep who resents newcomers and wants to "put a tarp on" neighborhoods like Capitol Hill that he thinks are growing too fast. That's not how living in a city works, Bill.
Lorena González is a badass civil-rights attorney who is probably going to become governor or something someday. González grew up in a family of migrant farm workers. As a lawyer, she fought for Latino students who'd been mistreated by school administrators and sued the city of Seattle on behalf of the Latino man a Seattle cop threatened to "beat the fucking Mexican piss" out of. (Do you even need any more information? Just mark the goddamn bubble already.)
As a council member, González is promising to work on gender pay equity, push forward the tenant protections and increased density in the city's housing affordability plan, and beef up enforcement of the city's labor laws.
González is taking donations from some folks we are not into—the reform-choking police guild, the Chamber of Commerce's political arm, Tim fucking Burgess—and we'll be watching closely to make sure she doesn't fold to those interests once in office. But her past work, her broad base of support, and the fact that she is not Bill Bradburd make this choice easy. Vote González.
Initiative Measure No. 122
Yes
If someone tries to tell you that you shouldn't vote for this campaign finance reform initiative because it fails to do away with dreaded special interest spending, fails to undo Citizens United, or fails to give every voter free artisan pot brownies and blowjobs, laugh in their fucking face and leave the room. A city initiative cannot fix our entire political system, which is and may forever be stacked in the favor of the people with the most money to spend. But we can start to empower those people who don't have money so they get involved in the system, potentially leading to all sorts of structural change over the long term.
This initiative does a lot of good stuff—lowers campaign contribution limits, limits contributions from people who have city contracts or lobby city officials, improves requirements for candidates reporting the money they're getting, and more. But its centerpiece is something called "democracy vouchers." Those are paper coupons you will get in the mail—four of 'em, worth $25 each—that you can donate to candidates so they can redeem them for cash. That cash comes from a small 10-year, $30 million property tax levy (that's about 12 bucks a year for the median Seattle home). By 2019, an online voucher system will exist, too. Sound weird? Yeah, new ideas sometimes sound weird. Get over it. Candidates opting into this new game could still take private money, but they would have caps on how much they could spend. (There are no such caps today.)
Now, this is the important part: The reason we need this initiative is that right now there are basically two classes of people out there—people who can afford to donate to political campaigns and people who can't. And who do politicians court during election season and then listen to and help out once they're in office? The first group. Who gets ignored? The second group. That makes those without money feel even less invested in the process, which makes them more likely to disengage altogether, which reinforces the whole damn problem.
Right now, according to research from the Sightline Institute (a backer of this initiative), a tiny fraction of people in the city are donating all the money that's funding city political campaigns. In 2013, half of all the money donated came from just .3 percent of all adults in the city. Who are those donors? As Sightline's report puts it, "rich white people who live in Seattle's waterfront and view homes." That is the world we live in right now. We can decide to be okay with that and keep talking ourselves to death about how fucked our political process is. Or we can do something to try to shift the balance.
Critics who claim this will push more money into special-interest-funded political action committees are ignoring the fact that this very thing is already happening and that it's not something city law can undo. Those who claim the levy won't pay for the voucher system are using misleading and faulty math. Do not believe them.
What opponents of this initiative are really saying is that they're okay with the status quo. You shouldn't be. Vote yes.
Proposition No. 1
Yes
Yes, this is a huge levy. At $930 million, it's the biggest one in Seattle's history. The city estimates it will increase property taxes for the median Seattle homeowner by about $145 a year or $12 a month.
And yes, property tax levies are inherently problematic and we're sick of paying for everything with them. We've already endorsed—what—40 or 50 property tax levies in this one batch of endorsements? Yes, yes: We know property tax increases affect both homeowners and low-income renters whose landlords pass the costs down to them. We wish this levy included some other sources of funding, like the business and parking taxes city council members Kshama Sawant and Nick Licata pushed for. But the rest of the city council blocked that effort, telling us they're saving those other taxes for some other needs. What the hell are those? NO ONE KNOWS. So this is what we're stuck with.
The problem is that we still need the stuff this levy is going to pay for—and we can't afford to wait. So you should vote yes on this levy and then immediately draft an e-mail to all your city council members telling them that now that you've opened your wallet, you want rich people and big business to do the same.
The Move Seattle levy addresses a set of unsexy but really important maintenance needs and improvements for the streets we already have. Our society's car fetish aside, making streets better also helps people who walk, bike, and bus.
The levy aims to fund half of the Bicycle Master Plan, building 50 miles of new protected bike lanes and 60 miles of greenways (those slow bike-and-pedestrian-focused streets). It is also expected to fund seven new RapidRide corridors, streets with bus-only lanes, and signal prioritization. The city plans to allocate $71 million from the levy to "Vision Zero," a program started in Sweden to change street designs and increase enforcement in order to reduce traffic fatalities. (That effort includes improving routes kids use to walk and bike to school. DO YOU HEAR THAT? Are you seriously going to vote against money that will allow children to walk to school without getting pulped by an SUV barreling through an unmarked crosswalk?)
Levy funding will likely start the process of figuring out how to make the deadly Ballard Bridge safer for bikes and pedestrians. It will likely build 150 new blocks of sidewalks and repair 225 other blocks. One other BFD detail: The Move Seattle levy can also be used to leverage state and federal money for all this stuff too, which is like getting free money to go along with the money you're paying. Because of that, the city expects to get more than $1.75 billion out of your $930 million.
A citizen oversight committee will track all this money, and any deviations from the spending plan of more than 10 percent require a three-fourths vote of the city council. One more thing: While we'll never stop complaining about how fundamentally unfair this state's lack of an income tax is, if you look at studies comparing property taxes in major cities, Seattle is near the middle or bottom. We can stand to pay more in property taxes for improvements that make this city safer for everyone. Vote yes.
SCHOOL BOARD
Seattle School District No. 1, District Director No. 1
Scott S. Pinkham
School board elections are a joke—we want to say that up front. School board elections are a fucking joke. Just putting it out there, and now that we've got that off our chest...
Michael Christophersen comes off as an unsettled rage monkey. We're tempted to endorse the guy for the sheer entertainment value. The school board is already a shit show—why not make it a little shit-showier? But that wouldn't be fair to all the kiddies. We asked Christophersen about accusations that he'd verbally abused a district staffer at a public meeting a few years ago. He admitted to making his strongly held views known, but he denied ever using abusive language. Okay. Then he went on to say that if elected, he would tell the district administrators: "Please don't come back to me with your bullshit." The SECB finds that kind of abusive language shocking. We almost had to break out Tim Keck's "smelling salts." (Or are they bath salts? We forget.)
Anyway, Scott S. Pinkham—a parent of two girls in public schools, a Native American, member of the Urban Native Education Alliance, and a University of Washington lecturer—kept his cool. He'll be an advocate for less standardized testing, better pay for teachers, and implementing a long overdue, historically accurate tribal curriculum (i.e., getting rid of the colonialist retellings of how the United States was created). "I want to be an advocate for those voices that often get muffled," he told us. Vote Pinkham. (Michael, we're eagerly looking forward to your hate mail. Make it special.)
Seattle School District No. 1, District Director No. 2
Rick Burke
School board elections are a joke. Just putting that out there. Again. That said...
The SECB really liked Laura Gramer. How could we not? She came in with her two adorable boys, who, unlike most children, weren't disgusting little shits. They played under the table, bumped their heads a few times, and munched on fruit snacks while we talked boring school policy stuff. Gramer is deaf, and she'd represent the disabled community on the school board. And she's clearly engaged and informed on a host of issues, from excessive standardized testing to racial equity. But we can't advise you to vote for her, unfortunately, because every time we asked her what she would do if elected, she rambled and didn't explain how she'd wield her limited powers as a board member to change things. She kept repeating, "I'll stay on top of it and make sure it happens." You need to come with specific plans, and Gramer didn't. But we hope she develops them and runs again.
Rick Burke, the cofounder of the Seattle Math Coalition, believes the district needs an auditor's office to measure compliance with the policies created by the school board. He wants the district to invest more in good instructional materials, including historically accurate tribal textbooks. If we could, we'd marry Gramer's passion and Burke's ideas, because Burke came off as rather bland. But while Gramer has garnered very few endorsements, Burke has a ton, including from Sue Peters, the only sitting school board member who voted against authorizing the district to take teachers to court when they went on strike in August. Vote Burke.
Seattle School District No. 1, District Director No. 3
Jill Geary
Like Yoda says: A fucking joke, school board elections are. Keep his teachings in mind, and also know this...
Jill Geary is fired up. During the teachers' strike, she was out on the picket lines marching in solidarity. At a recent forum, she talked about the state's criminal, chronic underfunding of schools and called the Seattle School District the "900-pound gorilla in this state. We need to bring the state along with us." FUCK. YES. As we wrote in August, Geary seems more ready than her competitor, Lauren McGuire, "to bully her more reticent colleagues on the board into exerting meaningful oversight over the school district's administrators, whose record is one of attracting the attention of federal investigators over allegations of institutional racism and sexism and lots of other terrible crap."
We made fun of ourselves in August for thinking that Geary could actually get in there and fix much at the district, which, after all, is where smart people go to die. But, honestly, she seems like the type to handle anything thrown her way, and this could be the year that we get an insurgent, progressive majority on the school board. Vote Geary.
Seattle School District No. 1, District Director No. 6
Leslie Harris
Yodel: O ho lay dee odl lee o, o ho lay dee odl ho school board elections are a fucking joke dee do!
Also: Oh my god, please don't remind us of how horrible Marty McLaren is. It's not just that she's an incumbent zombie who wasn't able to describe much of anything she'd accomplished on the school board during her SECB interview. Post-primary election, she confirmed what a waste of space she is by voting to allow the district to sue striking teachers. "A vote for me is a vote for stability," she said at a recent debate. "Stability" that causes thousands of teachers to walk off their jobs for two weeks, delaying the start of the school year? Huh.
Leslie Harris, on the other hand, was out on the picket lines during the strike. "I stand with teachers and school staff," she said. "Am I a change agent?" she shot back at the debate. "You betcha." And the district, which is under federal investigation for racial inequities in discipline, so desperately needs change in more ways than we have space to describe. Harris is a veteran PTA volunteer and paralegal with endorsements from all the right folks—including that pangolin that whispered in our ear during this endorsement meeting. Vote Harris. 
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