Exploring the City site

Total time: 20 minutes

Today, I researched the City of Seattle to similarly acquaint myself with the governing site of my local community. As with the State, I found that when I go their home site, if I do a search on the word ‘voter’ I can almost immediately locate the link addressing elections. In this case, the site is called the Ethics and Elections Commission:

(http://www2.seattle.gov/ethics/votersguide.asp)

Already I discovered there was a special election scheduled for February 9th for two school district levies. On this same page I could link to the voter’s pamphlet and determine the dates for the primary and general election. Most useful was the plain statement:

There are no regularly scheduled elections for Seattle City Council, Mayor or City Attorney in 2010. The next regularly scheduled elections for city offices will be in 2011.

There is no City of Seattle ballot measures currently scheduled to be on the ballot in 2010.

However, here is a List of Campaigns that have formed to promote or oppose potential 2010 ballot measures.


As it happens, we had our elections just last year for office positions, but this page also offered a list of City Council positions that will be on the ballot for 2011 and there was only one potential ballot issue posted. I thought this page provided a very tidy summary of what I can expect or not expect for 2010. Kudos, City of Seattle!

One link I found intriguing was a Charts and Graphs link, which apparently records campaign contributions categorized by type, area and size. I never really followed this or paid much attention, unless I heard it over the news media when special interest groups were particularly generous in promoting their cause.

There is also a contributor list available. The link provided a very user friendly way to inquire about contributors associated with any given campaign. Since there is only one potential issue registered so far, I made my inquiry. Right away a list popped up with names of donors along with their individual as well as aggregate donation.

So for now I know that there is a special School Levy vote on February and a potential ballot issue for some future election. I may take a deeper look at the Levy issues later in the week. In the past, I’ve been known to support school levies without much thought, but as our budgets tighten and in anticipation of higher taxes all around, I may have to give this further consideration.