Thank you for the opportunity to serve as your District #2 County Councilor for the 2021-2024 term. After giving careful thought to some recent family health news, I have made the hard decision not to run this year. I am committed to doing the Council’s work well for the remainder of my current term, but my values are family first and that is where my time and energy need to go given the current circumstances.
We’ve done a lot of good work together in a few short years:
– putting in vacation rental caps.
– providing funds to our non profit partners that will provide over 100 units of affordable housing.
– structuring climate resilience into the County organization’s thinking by creating a Climate and Sustainability Committee that brings Citizen Experts, county staff and community partners together.
– Creating a Department of Environmental Stewardship that captures hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants each year for nearshore habitat restoration, innovative solid waste management and boater education.
– hiring a professional Communications Coordinator who has vastly improved our website interface and community outreach.
– building skills for strong working relationships with the Tribal governments whose citizens have ancestral ties to these islands and waters.
– making sure the County workers are paid at hourly rates comparable to their regional counterparts. After all, if you want to have a healthy local economy, it sure helps if your largest employer pays a fair wage.
This is just part of what we have accomplished together and I am proud to be at the table. I look forward to 8 more months of good work on your County Council.
Kind regards,
Cindy Wolf
Orcas Island
In 1933, the WA State Grange was a very influential organization with many members. One issue that concerned Grange members at the time was water and public utilities for farms. Grange members wanted to vote for candidates, not based on their party affiliation, but how the candidate stood on the issue of rural water and electric power. In order to ensure that primary winners from both the Democrat and Republican parties would be those who agreed with the Grange stand on rural electric power, the Grange sued the state and won the case for being able to list all candidates from all parties on a single ballot. Having accomplished that, the Grange could then instruct its members on which candidates were most likely to support Grange issues.
That is how the state of Washington came to have a top-two primary system. In a top-two primary system, all candidates are listed on the same Primary Election ballot as opposed to getting an exclusively Democrat or Republican or Libertarian, or other single political party ballot. The top two vote-getters, regardless of their partisan affiliations, advance to the general election. Consequently, it is possible that two candidates belonging to the same political party could win in a top-two primary and face off in the general election. In many other states the primary is closed and only members of a political party receive the designated ballot for their party.
WASHINGTON — Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) issued the following statement after the second day of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s transcribed interview:
“After two days of testimony and 14 hours of questioning, many things became evident. During his interview today, Dr. Fauci claimed that the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come. He testified that the lab leak hypothesis — which was often suppressed — was, in fact, not a conspiracy theory. Further, the social distancing recommendations forced on Americans ‘sort of just appeared’ and were likely not based on scientific data.
The idea of caucuses dates as far back as the Roman Empire. Caucuses were an important part of the American way of life from the beginnings of our republic. In the 1770s the village church was the center of political caucuses where people met after church services to discuss the politics of the day.
By Liv Finne - Washington Policy Center
Oringinal Post Here
School choice programs give families between $4000 and $8000 per student to cover the cost of private education. These programs provide families public assistance to select a private school if their zip-code assigned public school is not a good fit for their child.
In the last two years school choice has exploded across the United States. In 2019, private school choice programs in the U.S. served only 500,000 students, less than 1 percent of the nation’s school children. Today 20 million students nationwide, or 36 percent, can get public aid to cover the cost of private education, according to the organization EdChoice.