Last night we exceeded our pledge-drive goal of 75 pledges! Thank you for all your donations. We are on the final push—ballots should arrive in your mailbox today or tomorrow. We know that the most persuasive political communication is when a friend tells another friend about a candidate.

You taking the time to ask your family, friends, and colleagues to vote for Mike is better than a week of TV.

Please copy the below message and email it to friends, family and colleagues!

Getting our message out is the way we will WIN this primary.

Thank you,

Michael McGinn

E-mail Message

Dear family, friends and colleagues,

It is increasingly clear that we are going to get a new Mayor. We have the power to decide what kind of a city we want Seattle to become.

As our Mayor, Mike McGinn will stop the $4.2 billion deep-bore tunnel that politicians are trying to force on us. It’s too expensive—the largest tax increase in Seattle history.

Improve Transit
Mike McGinn will expand light rail, add bus service and increase biking and walking options. He will work with Metro to make overcrowded buses a thing of the past.

Responsible for Seattle Schools
Mike McGinn agrees with the Obama Administration that mayors should take responsibility for city schools. He will turn Seattle schools around and be held accountable for their success or failure.

Technology
Mike McGinn will upgrade our Internet infrastructure to keep Seattle competitive in the world economy.

Mike McGinn is our only chance for an actual debate in the Mayor’s race.  He offers the only real alternative to Nickels policies, a new direction for Seattle’s future and opportunity for us to have a real debate about our future.

McGinn in the news:
The Stranger | He’s Our Only Chance for an Actual Debate
The Seattle Times | He’s the Guy Against the Tunnel

I need your help.   Ballots are being mailed this week and I need to contact as many voters as possible.

Independent polling shows that if our campaign advances out of the primary, we will start with a 24% to 43% advantage over Mayor Greg Nickels . The same polling also shows that we must get our message out in order to make it to the general election.

Our goal is 75 donations in the next 24 hours!

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Right now people are deciding who to vote for – they need to hear from us!

• $700 will send a piece of mail to over 15,000 targeted voters
• $500 will get 5,000 pieces of campaign literature in the hands of voters
• $250 will pay for 2,000 Get-Out-The-Vote calls to our McGinn supporters
• $50 pays for a night of volunteer phoning that can reach 400 voters
• $5, $10 or $20 can add up fast if enough people chip in

Our volunteers have literally called thousands of people and we know that when people hear about Mike McGinn they want to vote for him. Please donate today for the Seattle we believe in!

Today a group of individuals backing the deep bore tunnel held a press conference announcing that the tunnel is not a done deal.

As tunnel advocate Vlad Oustimovitch conceded, “In Seattle, nothing’s a done deal.”

For months tunnel supporters have tried to position the tunnel as a done deal as a way to quell public scrutiny despite the fact they have not released a finance plan and only 1% of the design work has been done.

McGinn said, “This is not a done deal. They clearly don’t want the public involved in this because the last time the public was involved 70% said no tunnel.”

Tunnel advocates today pointed out that the total project cost, before overruns, is $4.24 billion. The McGinn campaign has been using the number $4.2 billion. We regret the error.

There has been a lot of press lately about the $40,000 bonus for Seattle City Light Director Jorge Carrasco.  I share these concerns.  City Light faces a $90 million revenue shortfall, has frozen hiring and halved power line tree trimming, and plans for a large rate increase after the election.

The Nickels administration points to narrower contract provisions to defend the bonus, but the big picture is what troubles me.  City Light faces a financial crisis.  This is not the time to grant record discretionary bonuses.

But there’s something much more fundamentally troubling about Nickels’ relationship with city employees.

The single largest group of contributors to Mayor Nickels reelection campaign is City of Seattle employees  –  at latest count, $124,991. Compare that to less than $25,000 in city employee contributions to the 37 other campaigns this year for mayor and city council.

Nickels reliance on city employees is growing.  Less than 2 percent of his contributions came from city employees in his first two runs for mayor in 1997 and 2001.  But in 2005, he received over 16 percent of his contributions from city employees ($66,616).  And so far this year, city employees account for more than a quarter of Nickels’ contributions, and over a third of his contributions from individuals.  The numbers are even higher if you include contributions credited to the spouses and partners of city employees.

The vast majority of these contributors are political appointees.  Carrasco and his wife, for example, have contributed $1350 to the Nickels campaign, including $700 about a week after the $40,000 bonus was awarded.

Nickels has dramatically increased the number of employees who serve at the pleasure of the Mayor, and whose fate is tied to the Mayor’s reelection.  In 2002, there were 241 staff with the designation of “Strategic Advisor.”  By 2008, there were 431 such staff, an increase of 79 percent.  These advisors are paid about a third more, on average, than other city employees.

Here’s the problem — raising money from city employees and almost doubling the number of strategic advisors means that city government is increasingly dominated by political considerations. That’s not right.  The job of public servants is to serve the public, not form the core of a Mayor’s reelection campaign.

It’s also not fair to employees.  Imagine receiving a call from the Mayor, or one of his campaign staffers, asking for a political contribution.  And what effect do political contributions have on the Mayor’s management of employees.  For example,  do bigger donors get better treatment?

The proliferation of political appointees also sends a clear signal to city employees.  Keeping your job, or advancing, depends on the political fate of the Mayor.

It’s clear these practices have to stop if we want city employees to focus on making our city better, not just trying to make the politicians look better.

If elected Mayor, I will immediately work to stop the practice of city employees contributing to the campaigns of the elected officials who manage them or write their budgets.

And I will dramatically reduce the number of political appointees.

City employees need to focus on results, not reelection campaigns.

Michael McGinn

It didn’t get repealed.

Last week I posted this message about the other Mayoral candidates working to eliminate funding for neighborhood streets and pedestrian improvements, while simultaneously supporting the $4.2 billion viaduct tunnel. With the Mayor flip-flopping and almost all the candidates urging elimination of this funding source, repeal looked like a done deal.

Early In the Campaign Season, the Pressure Was On To Repeal the Head Tax

But I wasn’t the only one calling out these skewed priorities. Neighborhood, environmental and pedestrian advocates urged the City Council to keep the “head tax,” not just for neighborhood improvements, but for the jobs it provides.

And today, the city council indicated that they are going to put off any discussion of repealing the head tax until the end of the year.

Good for them. Cutting money for local streets and local jobs because of the “symbolism” of the tax just doesn’t pass the smell test.

We are in an era where we have to make real choices about how we are going to build the Seattle we want. If we want to reduce taxes and wasteful spending then let’s get out of the bad deal to build a deep-bore tunnel on the waterfront. It’s time to move from a manufactured debate about the head tax to a real debate about Seattle’s priorities.