Goldy

I totally agree with the Seattle Times editorial board in arguing that government should “use technology to provide public records cheaply,” but I can’t sign on to their actual arguments.

In fact, our public records statutes can create an incredible burden on public agencies, requiring untold hours at taxpayer expense to fulfill requests that often amount to little more than vindictive fishing expeditions.  (I’ve often been tempted to file a public records request asking for the cumulative cost to taxpayers of Stefan’s many public records requests… but I didn’t want to waste taxpayer money on a lark.)  So when the Times complains about proposed legislation that would raise the maximum copying charge to $0.25/page, or deny requests to people who refuse to pay their outstanding balance, they make it sound like fulfilling a request requires little more effort than feeding some documents into a copier.

Hardly seems right that public agencies would be making such a profit off documents to which citizens are entitled. Though municipal lobbyists suggest the higher fee would offset costs of staff time in fulfilling the request, that is expressly prohibited by the state’s Open Records Act.

Um… so… if the Times recognizes that there are actual “costs of staff time in fulfilling the request,” why would they suggest that public agencies are making a profit?

Of course, they’re not.  The Times is just being the Times.  But at least they attempt to be constructive.

A better idea? Require cities, counties, ports and school districts to better manage their records. Why not make documents available by e-mail or copying them on to a disc — pennies a serving — even less if the requester provides the disc.

Yeah, that would address the cost to the requester of making copies, but it does nothing to address the real cost:  the many staff hours spent gathering documents and fulfilling the request in the first place.  In fact, it takes just as much effort, if not more so, to scan a document to disk as it does to feed it into a copier.

So how about an even better “better idea”?  Since most records are produced on computers, why not just take every electronic document or file that would be open to a public records request, and just automatically place them in a searchable online database?  Every email.  Every Word document.  Every spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation.  Everything.

Because the vast majority of public records requests would probably be unnecessary if the records were actually, um, public.

UPDATE:
Erica takes umbrage:

Goldy argues that the “many hours of staff time” it takes to fill records requests should be compensated, and argues that every single public record maintained by government agencies should be put in computer files for the public to sift through themselves. The logic is tortured: Government agencies provide a valuable service we should pay them for (sifting through records to fill requests), therefore we should get rid of that service entirely and make people who file records requests find the records they want themselves. Not to mention the fact that most agencies don’t have a surplus of public-disclosure staff; in my experience, most government agencies only employ one public-disclosure officer. Is Goldy really arguing that we should eliminate that position from every government agency?

Um… no.  I’ve reread the post, and I don’t find myself making that argument anywhere.  I didn’t present an either/or.  Rather, I suggested that merely delivering records requests electronically doesn’t save all that much money, and that the real savings would come from putting as much of the public record as we can online, where much of the snooping could be done in a self-service manner.  But I don’t see how one infers from this post that I favor eliminating public-disclosure staff.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rX7-R54-Q8[/youtube]

I will agree with the whiners over at (u)SP about one thing: the turnout in last week’s special election for Elections Director was absolutely pathetic.  A week into the counting it looks like barely 22% of registered King County voters cast a ballot last Tuesday, compared to almost 84% in November.  To put that in perspective, the 48,001 votes runner-up David Irons Jr. managed to garner would have only amounted to about 5% of the November vote.

Huh.  I guess folks weren’t all that exercised about the performance of the elections office after all, a notion reinforced by the fact that Sherril Huff, the winner, was not only the incumbent, she was the only candidate in the race to speak out against electing the Elections Director in the first place.

It has been suggested to me that with the 2004 gubernatorial race finally over (and this was indeed the final nail in the coffin of that controversy), we can perhaps amend the charter back to appointing the Elections Director before the position goes back on the ballot in 2011.

Well, good luck with that.  Understandably, voters rarely vote for less democracy, no matter how sensible that option might be.

My daughter and I are flying to Florida later this week, and I’d love to get my hands on one of those nifty new Amazon Kindles to help pass the time on those long travel days, and perhaps a little more time while sitting by the pool.  But to be honest, I’m not a speedy reader, and I doubt I’ll get through even one book on this trip, let alone the twenty-or-so books I could buy with the money spent on the $359.00 Kindle alone.

Sure, it’s a cool piece of hardware, and the electronic-ink display is literally easy on the eyes—the best display technology I’ve yet seen for reading large amounts of text… you know, short of the printed page.  But the feature I covet most is the ability to wirelessly download one of hundreds of thousands of books, in minutes, from just about anywhere.

That’s the way content should be: totally and completely ubiquitous.  And while the book may yet survive as our last physical medium holdout (despite Jeff Bezos’ best efforts), content consumption in general is inevitably moving online.  No more CDs. No more DVDs or BlueRay.  And in some cities, no more newsprint.  Even radio and television broadcasters’ airwave monopoly will collapse as audio and video consumption increasingly shifts to the Internet.

I know there are a lot of people who worry about finding a business model that can support content creators in this new online world, but me, not so much, especially when there are so many smart, creative folks like Jeff Bezos out there willing to risk failure.  Yeah, sure, in the short term these new technologies are incredibly disruptive, but then, history tells us that new technologies almost always are.  

If we don’t find a viable business model, in the end, I believe, a viable business model will find us. In this, you could say, I almost have faith.

FAA to loosen fuel-tank safety rules, benefiting Boeing’s 787 :

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has quietly decided to loosen stringent fuel-tank safety regulations written after the 1996 fuel-tank explosion that destroyed flight TWA 800 off the coast of New York state.

The FAA proposes to relax the safeguards for preventing sparks inside the fuel tank during a lightning strike, standards the agency now calls “impractical” and Boeing says its soon-to-fly 787 Dreamliner cannot meet.

[…] But the move has stirred intense opposition inside the local FAA office from the technical specialists — most of them former Boeing engineers — responsible for certifying new airplane designs.

Good.  Now, if a 787 blows up in a lightning strike, we know exactly who to sue.

Former Renton hypnotist sentenced for fraud

The imagination runs wild, but alas, the fraud had absolutely nothing to do hypnotism.

Our friends at (u)SP are still in a huff over Huff, disappointed that King County’s newly elected Elections Director does not represent “change” (ie, a partisan Republican), and fantasizing once again about the prospect of overturning an election in court.  (How’d that work out for you last time, Stefan?)

But while the “all Dems are crooks” crowd continues to scoff at her mere plurality, it is interesting to note that Huff keeps edging closer toward an actual majority as the ballots trickle in, her 44% election night lead growing to about 46.3% by Thursday afternoon, an impressive 27-point margin over the runner up. In a six-way race, that’s a landslide.

And that Stefan and friends just can’t seem to accept the results as legitimate?  Well, I think that tells you everything you need to know about their respect for the intelligence and integrity of King County voters.

Following up on my previous post about Pend Oreille County’s efforts to triple the $1.4 million a year in impact fees Seattle City Light pays on the Boundary Dam, I stumbled across some numbers which kinda pound home one of my central theses:  that contrary to the bitching and moaning often heard from the other side of the mountains, big, bad Seattle is not sucking tax dollars from the rest of the state.

At least, not when it comes to transportation dollars.

According to a report from the Washington State Department of Transportation (hat tip: Political Buzz), between 1984 and 2003, the Puget Sound region received 98-cents back for every $1.00 spent in state and federal transportation taxes.  And Pend Oreille County?  They saw an impressive $2.58 return.  That’s a $68 million subsidy over 20 years, or roughly $260 annually per man, woman and child.

Of course, after decades of neglect and a couple of gas tax increases, things have turned around for Puget Sound residents, who are projected to realize a $1.02 return for every buck spent between 2004 and 2015… though Pend Oreille still brings home the bacon, munching on a sizzling $1.88 of transportation spending for every dollar in taxes.  Sweet.

I point this out not to begrudge Pend Oreille’s good fortune, but merely to acknowledge that it exists.  An acknowledgement you won’t get from most Eastern Washington politicians, who would rather play the “Fuck Seattle” game than address their region’s underlying problems.

Yesterday the Seattle Times reported on the fiscal crisis in rural Pend Oreille County, where declining tax revenues and stingy voters have forced local officials to seek a bailout from Seattle City Light, which owns and operates the profitable Boundary Dam on the Pend Oreille River in the northeast corner of the state.

Well… maybe “seek a bailout” isn’t the right term.

To compensate Pend Oreille County, Seattle pays an annual fee, which last year was $1.3 million. Now, leaders of this poor, sparsely populated and isolated county want to share in the riches Seattle has found on their river. They’re pressuring Seattle to triple its annual fee.

“It’s kind of like we’re the cow and they’re getting the milk from the cow in our barn,” said County Commissioner Laura Merrill, “and so there is an impact in Pend Oreille County.”

No, it’s kinda like Pend Oreille is a county in which there’s a dairy farm, and the owner of the farm is getting the milk from the cows in their barn. But, whatever.

City Light owns that dam, and took a big risk back in 1964, investing millions of dollars constructing the dam and 300 miles of transmission lines at a time when electricity was relatively cheap.  It’s the kind of public investment and forethought that has long delivered Seattle residents some of the lowest electricity rates in the nation.

And in return, Pend Oreille County got well-paid jobs, a recreational lake and new school buildings… not to mention about $1.3 million in annual impact fees, plus cheap, wholesale electricity that saves county ratepayers about $20 million a year… all told, an average of about $1,615 in direct cash benefits annually for every man, woman and child in Pend Oreille.

That was the deal.  Signed, sealed and delivered.

It’s not that I don’t have empathy for Pend Oreille County’s current predicament—I do, and I wouldn’t necessarily oppose some sort of grant to help them out.  But it’s a predicament they got themselves into, and I’m getting pretty damn sick and tired of rural Washingtonians blaming Seattle residents like me for all of their problems.

In Pend Oreille County, politicians and residents harbor some resentment toward Seattle. They feel the west side of the state doesn’t understand their rural lifestyle or their conservative politics. They’re outnumbered in the Legislature. Regardless, they find themselves somewhat dependent on Seattle.

Seattle paid for the county’s school for grades 7-12 as part of the original deal in the 1960s to build the dam. Since then, enrollment in the Selkirk Consolidated School District No. 70 has fallen by nearly half, and seven bond measures to remodel the school have failed.

It’s not Seattle’s fault that Pend Oreille voters refuse to tax themselves for the services they need, nor that the state has fewer and fewer resources to help them out.  Seattle taxpayer… City Light ratepayer… we’re one and the same… and if Pend Oreille wanted more of our money, perhaps they shouldn’t have voted for I-695 by a better than 2-1 margin, eliminating most of the state car tab, and with it, the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales tax equalization transfers on which rural communities had long relied to help balance their budgets?  And if they wanted a little sympathy from Seattleites like me, perhaps they shouldn’t have passed I-776 by a 69% margin, an initiative that had absolutely no impact on Pend Oreille taxpayers, but was successfully marketed by Tim Eyman as a “Fuck Seattle” measure that would keep us from taxing ourselves to build the light rail system we wanted.

They harbor resentment toward us? For what… building their infrastructure and subsidizing their public services?  If the Boundary Dam was owned by a corporation, well, that’s capitalism baby, and I doubt you’d see Pend Oreille have much success pressuring shareholders to triple their payments, you know… just because.  But since it’s owned by Seattle ratepayers, we should feel all guilty and everything over how well our investment paid off, and just fork over a share of the profits?  I don’t think so.

Rural governments and the communities they serve are in crisis statewide, many on the verge of insolvency, and it’s a crisis that the state needs to address collectively.  But we’ll never move closer to a lasting solution until elected and civic leaders throughout rest of the state stop lazily blaming Seattle for all of their woes, and start taking a realistic tally of what it actually costs to provide the public services their communities need and want.

It’s long been in vogue amongst Seattle’s politiscenti to complain about Rep. Jim McDermott’s lack of effectiveness and leadership in Congress.

Of course, what they really mean is that McDermott doesn’t bring home the bacon, and he’s never much bothered to use his safe seat and affluent Seattle district to raise—and spread around—the kinda money generally necessary to climb up the ranks of the party leadership.  No, McDermott often marches to the beat of his own drummer, and he’s certainly no Norm Dicks or Patty Murray when it comes to playing the influence game.

But lack of effectiveness and leadership?  I don’t think so.  And apparently, neither do his colleagues in the House, who have rewarded his tireless work on behalf of expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) by giving him the honor of managing the floor time today during final passage of the bill, and who have asked him to attend the signing ceremony with President Obama later this afternoon at the White House.

Beholden to no one but his own conscience and that of his overwhelmingly liberal constituency, McDermott has provided plenty of leadership on a number of issues, often with little regard for the likelihood of public approbation or short term success.  It was McDermott who famously invited national scorn on himself by going to Baghdad in the days prior to the US invasion to argue against the lies of the Bush administration, and it was McDermott who was ultimately proven right about the facts on the ground and the war’s disastrous cost in blood, treasure and prestige.

And it is McDermott who has qixotically fought for universal health care even as the Republican tide made such reforms an impossible dream.

Well… as today’s passage of SCHIP will show, that tide has finally turned.

At the Democratic National Convention in Denver last summer, I asked the 72-year-old McDermott about persistent rumors (and wishful thinking amongst the many local Dems who covet his job) that this might be his last term in office, and he laughed off the suggestion, telling me that he intends to stay in Congress at least until he sees a major health care reform package signed by the President.  It may not be the single payer system that he prefers, but considering where the other Washington has been on this issue for much of his tenure, any reform that leads us down the slippery path toward universal access would be a huge accomplishment, and a giant cherry on top of McDermott’s long political career.

So those of you ambitious pols eagerly waiting for McDermott to step out of your way (and you know who you are), you better cross your fingers and wish Jim Godspeed on his final challenge.

UPDATE:
Rep. McDermott has issued the following statement on SCHIP:

“We speak for the children who are the most vulnerable in our society, especially during this time of economic crisis.  I cannot imagine how anyone could vote against America’s children.  Approving SCHIP is the most humane thing to do and I mean that in the truest sense of the word.  Yet, some on the other side will vote against it claiming they are fiscal conservatives; please note these very same so-called fiscal conservatives squandered a trillion dollars on a needless war in Iraq, and drove the U.S. economy into a ditch.  And now they want to deny children the ability to go see a doctor when they are sick.”

Incumbent Sherril Huff easily won yesterday’s special election for King County Elections Director, garnering an impressive 44% of the vote in a six-person race.  And our good friend Stefan’s spin on Huff’s solid victory?

In 2007 56% of the voters said that it would be a good idea to elect the Elections Director. 44% said it would be a bad idea.

Again in 2008 56% of the voters said that it would be a good idea to elect the Elections Director. 44% said it would be a bad idea.

In 2009 56% of the voters voted for a reform candidate. 44% of the voters voted for a candidate who thought it would be a bad idea to elect the Elections Director; who has repeatedly covered up and lied about problems in the Elections office under her watch; and who wasn’t even eligible to run for the office in the first place.

Perhaps the 44% who voted for her were the same 44% who said it was a bad idea to elect the Elections Director to begin with and were trying to prove to the other 56% that they were right all along!

Yeah, well, Stefan is nothing if not a poor loser.

I’m one of those 44% who voted against electing an Elections Director (and for the only qualified candidate in the race) because I’d rather have somebody who knows how to run elections in the office than somebody who knows how to run for them—but bizarrely picking an elections director in a wide-open, low-turnout, no-primary, special election?  Well that’s just plain stupid and irresponsible.

Yet that’s the gamed system that Stefan and his band of bitter, inconsolable Dinophiles pushed for in an effort to sneak a partisan Republican past voters, and so I find it particularly ironic to hear him whining about the outcome after the fact.  I mean, if Stefan really believes that a mere 44% plurality of voters just thwarted the will of a 54% majority, perhaps he and his fellow “reformers” should have fought for a primary that would have separated the wheat from the chaff?

But then, who am I to question Stefan’s motives, let alone his statistical prowess?

I’m not sure that I’ve ever voted by mail before, and so like a lot of inveterate poll voters it was hard for me to approach this election day any differently than previous ones.  But it is different, and if I don’t get my ballot postmarked today, my vote just won’t count.  And considering the subject of today’s special election, if my vote doesn’t count today, it just may not in the future either.

This is an election for Elections Director, and if you need any evidence of how stupid it is to elect a position that requires very specific technical expertise, just look at some of the names on the ballot:  gadfly, a liar, a right-wing gun nut looking for a six-figure salary….

And then there’s our friend David Irons Jr., the Republican front-runner, a raging bullshitter with a documented history of financial mismanagement and abusive behavior.  But even more pertinent to this election, he’s also a man with a documented history of violating our state’s election laws:

From: Mark Banks
Date: January 25, 2009 1:12:43 pm PST
To: letters@redmond-reporter.com, letters@sammamish-reporter.com, letters@seattleweekly.com, letters@woodinville.com, letters@bellevue.com, letters@duvall.com, letters@covington.com, letters@seattletimes.com
Subject: Special Election of King County Elections Director

Dear Editor,

I am extremely disturbed to see that David Irons, Jr. is running for the important position of King County Elections Director.  David Irons is a thief who I personally caught red handed steeling campaign signs in Sammamish in 2002, when he was running for King County Commissioner.  I was driving by when I saw him dressed in his Sunday best climbing over the road barrier to pick up his opponent’s signs and throwing them in the ditch.  I had heard stories of him steeling signs and loading up his van with them in a previous election, but this was the first time I saw it for myself.  I stopped and talked with him and demanded that he climb down the gully to retrieve the signs from the blackberry bushes, which he finally did.   Do we honestly want a man who would stoop so low to achieve personal political gain in a day and age when election fraud is rampant?

Mark Banks
Redmond WA

You want your elections managed by an unethical, partisan hothead?  Vote for Irons.  But if you want a dispassionate, experienced professional in the office of Elections Director, vote for Sherril Huff.

And by all means, get your ballot in the mail today.