CITY COUNCIL
Muni Leaguer Lonnie Lusardo, who took on police accountability as part of a police-civilian task force back in the 1990s, says he’s “assessing the possibility” of running for City Council. Most recently, Lusardo helped organize last month’s Seattle Race Conference, sparked by two fatal police shootings last year. He’s pro-density, anti-monorail, and supports impact fees to pay for growth. Though he won’t say who he’s gunning for on the council, Margaret Pageler’s name has come up in connection with a Lusardo run. “So many people I talk to have allegiances to certain incumbents,” Lusardo says. Odds are that Lusardo won’t join the Judy Nicastro pile-on; the first-term member already has a whole passel of potential opponents of her own. One of those, Kollin Min, has hired Moxie Media to rev up his PR strategy. Meanwhile, Daryl Smith, another probable candidate for Nicastro’s seat, has hooked up with housing levy champion Christian Sinderman to run what Sinderman acknowledges is going to be a long-shot campaign. “Because it’s so hard to beat an incumbent in this city, when we have good candidates, we should promote them,” Sinderman says.
MONORAIL
The board of the Seattle Monorail Project is starting to look like a confab at the Rainier Club, what with all the downtown developer bigwigs (Clise Properties officer Richard Stevenson) and big-business types (Weyerhaeuser flack Patricia Akiyama). Five interim members of the 10-person board will step aside, not all of them willingly: The eternally quotable Cindi Laws, the West Seattle consultant and gung-ho monorail supporter, says she was one of seven who wanted to stay. “There was an enormous amount of pressure from outside our body that we needed to have people with greater experience and ties to downtown,” she says. In addition to mouthing off in the press, Laws butted heads with fellow boardmembers over the issue of boardmembers’ pay. She says she’ll consider running for election in November, when two monorail board seats (the one held by Akiyama, who doesn’t plan to run, and Dick Falkenbury’s) will be up for grabs.
Falkenbury, the original monorail man, says, “Nobody did anything wrong” to get booted off the board. But Falkenbury acknowledges he “didn’t play a role” in choosing new board members, and says he feels “marginalized” by his fellow board members’ reluctance to support his proposals, including one last week to give bonuses only for exceptional work.
INITIATIVES
Tim Eyman’s latest initiative may have crashed and burned in a King County courthouse Monday, but that won’t keep him out of the news. Besides defending I-776, shot down for violating the constitutional single-subject rule, Eyman is busy denouncing a bill that would regulate the initiative process and provide incentives for routing proposals through the Legislature, not the ballot. In an Associated Press story last week, wanna-be shock-jock Eyman gallingly likened himself to a Jew in Nazi Germany, criticizing a proposal to require signature-gatherers to wear badges as “this idea that you have to wear a Star of David on your chest.” In fairness, though, Eyman’s pity-mongering is hardly more ridiculous than some of Seattle Weekly‘s letter writers, who have repeatedly compared the initiative king to Adolf Hitler.
Erica C. Barnett
