Tacoma Citizen Initiative 7, the 2017 water protection petition filed last month by Save Tacoma Water is going to become law without even the need to collect signatures. The repealing of Subsection 12.10.400 in the municipal code gets rid of the secret sweetheart deal language Initiative 7. Two weeks ago, a unanimous vote by the Tacoma Public Utilities Board moved this to the city council. The Tacoma City Council is expected to pass a resolution. Good job to all who worked on Initiative 7 as this is a big win for the community and STW.

With that matter taken care of, STW has shifted energy towards eliminating the term limit loophole in the Tacoma City Charter.

Those opposed to STW (the political class around town and both newspapers), are asking STW what term limits have to do with water.

Here is part of what will be printed this week-end in the Tacoma News Tribune, “Preserving Tacoma term limits provides for rotation of elected officials and opportunities for new people, new ideas and new directions. Evidence of a need for new leadership are the crowds of people filling public meetings to protest the methanol refinery and advocating for a safe port and community without a dangerous LNG plant. When career politicians stay in office for more than eight years, ideas like LNG begin to take hold as politicians begin favoring corporations over the interests of residents and voters.”

STW is just one of the groups supporting the term limit effort, Tacoma Direct Action just endorsed and we expect other groups and individuals to endorse soon. If you know of a business, organization or individual (yourself) that will endorse, please email STW and we will be sure the endorsement list is updated.

Initiative 8, the term limit initiative, is actually a charter change, which requires a huge number of signatures.

12,794 signatures from registered Tacoma voters are needed, but the goal is to collect 17,000, just to be sure we have enough. This is a daunting task that can be accomplished. It will take your time and money. We hope you will consider helping on this very important initiative to protect our water.

The text of Initiative 8 is modeled after Pierce County’s term limit language which is simple, direct and fixes the loophole in just 57 words. Here it is (text in brackets is the current language and the underlined text is the new term limit language):

Tacoma City Charter Section 2.35 – [No person shall be allowed to serve on the Council for more than ten (10) consecutive years, either as a Council Member, Mayor, or combination thereof.]  No person shall be allowed to serve in City elective office for more than two consecutive 4-year terms, complete or partial as a Council Member and/or Mayor but shall be allowed to serve again after an 8-year break in service. Establishment of residency in an alternate district will not circumvent this two-term restriction.

The first day the i8 term limit petitions will be ready for signing and picking up is this coming Wednesday, April 5 at Tully’s in downtown Tacoma from at 6:30 – 8:00 PM. Tully’s is great, they are allowing STW to bring in pizza to share with folks as they stop by to pick up sheets (consider supporting Tully’s by buying a cup of coffee). 250 special edition, purple sheets, will be printed for the evening. We hope to pass out all the sheets and completely fill them up in the next couple of weeks which would bring in 5,000 signatures – a huge move towards accomplishing the goal of collecting 17,000. Initiatives are allowed 180 days to collect signatures, but since we need this on the ballot this November, we have less than 100 days to collect the necessary signatures – our deadline is July 7, 2017. We can do this!

We hope to see as many of you as possible on Wednesday. If you cannot make it that day, petition sheets will always be available for pick-up and drop off at the Lamp Repair Shop (1524 Tacoma Ave S) and more locations as time goes on.

Thank you for your community involvement, for caring about your city, and for joining us as we work together to give Tacoma residents a voice about the use of our water. Onward to the ballot!

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Signature collecting begins this week for all citizen advocates wanting new leadership in Tacoma. Tacoma’s polluted past should not be part of our future. A special edition of the i8 petition will be printed in purple and available for pick up this Wednesday, April 5 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM at Tully’s in downtown Tacoma (free parking begins at 6:00 PM).

Save Tacoma Water has endorsed this effort and is inviting the community to join us Wednesday to be the first signers on the petition and to pick up sheets to help us collect 17,000 in 100 days. Time to start collecting.

Below, are samples of what the petition looks like. On the back you will find a list of endorsers and they will have petition sheets available for pick up at their places of business.

Some fun slogans from the hey day of term limit movement in the 90’s.

• Throw the bums out – support term limits
• Term Limits Now
• Two Term Limit – 1 in office, 1 in jail

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In 1973, voters limited terms of Tacoma elected officials to 10-consecutive years in office – the very first city in the nation to implement term limits. For 46 years, term limits worked until now, when a politician discovered a loophole.

Elected officials can resign from their seat before it ends to avoid the 10-consecutive years in office law, and run for a city council position without taking a real break in service, as the law intended.

Last December, a Tacoma City Council Member resigned from office and announced their candidacy for mayor the same day.

People make a career out of politics all the time, but it should not be in one position.

Tacoma has a City Manager Form of Government, therefore a council member and the mayor have essentially the same power, one vote of nine.

The Tacoma City Council is a part-time body of nine elected officials. Five of these electeds come from five council districts, three positions are at-large (city-wide) and the mayor, who is also elected city-wide. The mayor position was always part-time until back in the 90’s when Mayor Ebersole convinced the council members for a huge pay raise for full time work, even though there was and still is a full-time city manager with a huge staff.

After the announcement last December by the Loophole Candidate, a group of concerned citizens began meeting and wrote changes to the charter to end the term limit loophole. After a great deal of discussion and rewrites, the group agreed on the language and filed the term limit amendment on the Ides of March (March 15), 2017.

The current term limit language, in the Tacoma City Charter, fails to include a break in service period prior to running again for the city council – which this proposed charter amendment cures. Language is required that defines a break in service as the current law has a loophole which is now being exploited.

Term limits essentially are now gone, as any elected official can resign from their seat and wait just one month, one week or even just one hour before filing day for their seat again on the council to avoid term limits.

The community has been quietly grumbling and fuming about this end-run on term limits for four months now. There is concern about this Loophole Candidate who is refusing to represent the community. This candidate is on record supporting the now abandoned methanol refinery and currently supports the dangerous LNG storage tank planned for the tide flats, courtesy of Puget Sound Energy. Not to mention, this same candidate was part of the city council that sued their own citizens for collecting signatures on a water protection petition and then withheld and over-redacted public records that got the city into yet another Public Records violation lawsuit. Just a few weeks ago a judge fined the city $50,000 for over redacting public records.

Woodards supports LNG

The proposed Tacoma Charter Change Amendment on term limits is modeled after the Pierce County Charter term limit language. This proposed term limit amendment defines the sitting out period of two 4-year terms. Additionally, defining the term limit language using the word term instead of year updates the language, making it consistent with the term limit language in the Pierce County Charter as well as around the nation.

Here is the proposed charter amendment term limit language (the text in bold is the new language):

Tacoma City Charter Section 2.35 – No person shall be allowed to serve on the Council for more than ten (10) consecutive years, either as a Council Member, Mayor, or combination thereof. No person shall be allowed to serve in City elective office for more than two consecutive 4-year terms, complete or partial as a Council member and/or Mayor but shall be allowed to serve again after an 8-year break in service. Establishment of residency in an alternate district will not circumvent this two-term restriction.

12,794 valid signatures from Tacoma registered voters are needed by July 7, 2017.

17,000 signatures need to be collected to be sure there is enough of a cushion to make it to the November 7, 2017 ballot.

Signature collection should begin 10 days after filing, as the law provides. Once the city attorney approves the petition form, sheets will be printed and ready for people to sign. The hope is to have petitions ready at the Save Tacoma Water meeting on Monday, March 27, Tully’s downtown at 6:30 PM.

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Public Testimony in Opposition to House Bills 1594 and 1595
Good afternoon.
My name is Arthur West. I live in Olympia.
I have been coming to the legislature for over a decade testifying against bills almost exactly like HB 1594 and 1595. It seems every year “public servants” like the AWC, WSAC and the WPPA muster their “minions of darkness” to propose legislation like HB 1594 and 1595. Their goal is always the same, to undercut the Public Records Act by small incremental steps,  and every year we have to sit through a parade of horror stories about how terrible it is that citizens can actually hold their government accountable.  Although this year we have a study group smokescreen, every year, including this one, it is the taxpayer funded lobbying entities of the shadow government that are the dark forces behind these assaults. (see Telford, Casting Sunlight on Shadow Government, Leslie Marshal, 24 Seattle U. L. Rev. 139 (2000)
It is understandable that the unholy trinity of the AWC, WSAC, WPPA and their minions of darkness might dislike the PRA like vampires abhor sunlight, since the concept of citizen control over government that underlies the PRA is contrary to the intent of these groups to disenfranchise the ordinary citizen, and the PRA’s continued existence is an obstacle to their totalitarian political agenda.  Through the years a number of factors typically characterize shadow government legislation, and while  carefully designed to appear innocuous their faces, HB 1594 and 1595 exhibit these typical hallmarks.

1. The bill is advanced behind a smokescreen of self-serving subjective horror stories.
One recurring theme in the PR that accompanies shadow government legislation is the demonization of citizens who seek public records and the attempt to create a climate of hysteria to in order to justify allowing government to evade the reasonable requirements of the PRA. Outraged and exaggerated testimony by local agencies that they are the blameless victims of evil and abusive citizens seeking records via requests they cannot answer is one telltale red flag that the forces of darkness are behind the legislation. In reality, the act as it now exists allows agencies to act reasonably to answer requests in installments without interfering with their other duties.

2. The sponsors do not communicate with or address concerns of actual stakeholders.
A second hallmark of shadow government legislation is the total refusal of the sponsors to communicate in good faith with WASHCOG, Allied Daily Newspapers, or the requestor community. As an example, I have been testifying against every heinous bill these people propose consistently for over 5 years and have never once been contacted by any of these shadow government entities prior to the relaunch of their annual assaults on the public’s right to know.

3. A few examples of “burdensome” requests are advanced to attempt to prove that PRA must be changed. Another point of continuity is the manipulation of a few overly broad requests into a state of public emergency. While this may appear slightly different due to the packaging these are the same concerns that have been advanced for a decade by the forces of darkness. In reality, agencies have broad authority to produce records in installments, and the act only allows penalties when an agency acts unreasonably. What the sponsors attempt to obscure is the fact that the intent of these bills is to shield unreasonable withholding of records from any possibility of redress.

4. The stated intent is to improve the act but the changes are stealthily designed to undercut and render the act ineffectual by small incremental steps. Inevitably, the proponents disclaim any intent to weaken or eviscerate the act, and their stated intent is to improve it and lessen the burden on local government. However, another point of congruency on all of the shadow government legislation is that it is sneakilly designed to set us upon the path to rendering the Public Records Act ineffectual through a series of small subversive amendments, like replacing the requirement that an agency respond with a requirement that the agency declare the request unclear and seek “Arbitration” for such “unclear” request. Such a practice might sound workable in theory but would be unworkable in the real world because all requests would be seen as unclear and no agency would have to respond to even the most objectively clear request. Further, allowing agencies to impose unlimited charges based upon ill defined and subjective criteria would place the cost of seeking records beyond the ordinary citizen.

5. The real intent of the legislation is to doom the PRA to the death of a thousand cuts.
What the Cities and Counties, Ports, Fire Districts, and the well financed private publicly funded shadow government organizations that represent them before the legislature seek to accomplish in these bills is to initiate the first small steps in their decades old long term plan to render the PRA toothless and ineffective so that they can continue to unreasonably deny citizens access to essential records with impunity and retaliate against them for questioning the actions of their government free from any reasonable prospect of any substantial consequences for their actions.
The provisions this bill seeks to impose would be devastating on the ability of ordinary citizens to be informed in a timely manner of even such basic facts as what financial conflicts of interest their local officials might have, what  building projects their city was proposing in their neighborhood or whether the playground their children play in is contaminated by toxic or cancer causing chemicals.
This bill reflects the opinion of its shadow government authors that agencies are being unduly burdened by telling their citizens swhat they are doing, and that they are improperly penalized for inadvertent mistakes or omissions due to unclear requests. This is simply untrue. The only way a judge can assess a penalty under the Act is if they find that an agency acted unreasonably in withholding records. To say that allowing a court to determine the plain words of a request is unclear or that courts cannot be trusted to make the right decisions is a slap in the face to the impartiality and integrity of the hard working magistrates that make up our judicial branch. The option of mediation is always available if the parties agree, so this arbitration in this bill would add nothing to what exists and appears to be a pretext to allow the assertion of lack of clarity to justify unreasonable delay and obfuscation.

6. The enemies of the public’s right to know march in lockstep to promote their bills.     Finally, the most telltale indicator of a shadow government assault on the public’s right to know is the vast number and tone of the publicly funded officials and entities goose marching in lockstep to testify in support of restricting public access to records and justice. Ironically, while they crowd the hearing rooms to the point where ordinary citizens are excluded and make self serving claims of lack of resources, their very multitudes assembled on the public’s dime belie their transparent claims of lack of resources. Often the tone of a communication is more important than its contents and often the message implied by the tone of the shadow government’s minions of darkness is that citizens have no right to oversee the actions of the entities that serve them and that citizen access to records must be curtailed.
With all due respect to the unholy trinity of the Cities, Counties Ports, and the rest of the minions of darkness and quasi-private shadow government agencies that orchestrate these decades old annual assaults on the people’s right to know, their representations distort the basic reality that without the strong protections of our Public Records Act as it now exists the public would be subject to much higher costs in the form of rampant and unchecked government mismanagement and corruption.
Please do not support the shadow government’s latest incremental assault on the rights of the public by indulging them in their latest annual attempt to slowly, by small but determined steps, dismantle the law that, more than any other measure, protects the people’s right to know.

Water Rates Public Hearing today. Still no language provided to make comments on. COT approved minutes last night with minutes from the TPU meeting in December, they read in part: “Power Policy/Residential Rate Design: The residential rate design staff proposal is to put 100 percent of the increase into the customer charge. The rationale is to reduce seasonal bill variability and enhancing financial stability. A rate design study, the objective of which was to determine which rate design will minimize the negative impacts of the proposed rate increase, was conducted.”

Further down in the minutes: “The target rate effective date is April 1, 2017.”

Really? They chose April Fool’s Day?

Every three years, water rates are reviewed. In 2014 the water rate language is in Resolution No. 38876  – “A resolution amending the Water Rate and Financial Policy to facilitate the development of term-limited, market-based wholesale water rates.” In 2014, the rules were amended to take the vote. Wow.

The TPU is sponsoring the Public Hearing this evening on increasing water rates, but the language with the  proposed water rates is not available.

STW wants the 46 words of the Tacoma Municipal Coded 12.10.400 (H) deleted. This section basically provides secret sweetheart deals to large users of fresh water.

With such late notice going out, if people cannot make it, comments are encouraged.

Below is a list of dates for other opportunities to make public comments. If making public comments is not your thing, please consider contacting the TPU commissioners and Tacoma City Council Members.

Friday, Feb. 3, 2017

Tacoma Public Utilities sent out an email regarding a year long process developing new water rates. Below is how the email read when it arrived to those lucky enough to be on the list.

Subject: Tacoma Public Utility Board Meeting Notifications
Date: February 3, 2017 5:27:14 PM PST

Note the time and the day – someone was working late.

The Public Meetings Act requires a minimum of five days notice for meetings. Tacoma Water ratepayers should be asking TPU why such late notice was sent out about something they have been working on for the past year?

Save Tacoma Water is urging ratepayers to show up and voice their opinion about the planned increases.

STW supports higher rates for large water users as water is a precious public resource and higher rates encourages conservation.

STW supports higher rates for super huge water users (industry giants using more than one million gallons of fresh water a day).

TPU already has one super huge water user

Additionally, STW has concerns about Tacoma Municipal Code 12.10.400 (H).

The 46 words in Section H need to be deleted.

Section H reads: “H. Special Contracts. The Superintendent, with the approval of the Board, shall have the right to enter into contracts for periods up to 20 years where service conditions are extraordinary; provided, that such contracts shall contain applicable rates as adopted by the Board and the City Council.”

It was under this provision that TPU negotiated a special contract with Niagara. Deleting this section in its entirety removes the authority of TPU/City to give special sweetheart deals to companies like Niagara, a for profit business utilizing our public resource.

TPU’s web site does not provide the actual language the TPU commissioners will be considering. All the public has just five days before the hearing regarding rates is this:

“Residential Rates Proposals

TPU clearly does not want an informed public to make comment, nor do they want to provide the public adequate notice. Providing just 5 days notice with only minutes to spare to be within the Public Meetings Act should give all ratepayers pause for concern.