The Political Desk: Portal to Portal

Ah, the Port of Seattle. Come rain or shine, this agency, responsible both for the physical seaport and the airport, can always be relied upon to provide political entertainment and frustration.

A few years back, the port welcomed a Shell drilling rig into the Sound as its winter home-away-from-home when it gets too cold in the Arctic. This managed to cheese off environmental types (who, armed with kayaks, swarmed the rig) as well as other traditional democracy-fanciers by doing it in the political dead of night with little public input. But that's old news. The new news is that the CEO of the Port (chosen by the Port Commissioners) seized on a measure to give non-union port employees a raise to give HIMSELF a raise to the tune of $24k. Said Port CEO is no longer with us, and Shell has decided we're saving too much gas to make drilling in Arctic worthwhile for the moment, but we still have the Commissioners that make things like this all possible.

And incumbency and name recognition counts, so the incumbents will likely be back. So let's look at this with an eye towards who can handle them.

Commission Position No. 1 has John Creighton and the incumbent, who has been burdening my mailbox with fliers about how great things are going, if you only ignore the kayaks and CEOs. Oh, and trying to keep airport employees exempt from the new minimum wage law. There have been times when I've been on his side. Not this time. I see Claudia Kauffman is on the list. Claudia was my state senator, and didn't embarrass us (which is always a plus, in my opinion).  Bea Queida-Rico actually has experience working in the port, so I think she's be a good add as well. But for the primary I'm going for Claudia Kauffman.

Commission Position No.3 has Stephanie Bowman and the incumbent, who has not been particularly bad, but asleep at the wheel things keep happening under her tenure. Opposing her are Lisa Espinoza and Ahmed Abdi. I'm going for Ahmed Abdi, but we'll have this discussion again.

Commission Position No. 4 is a jump ball, as there are no incumbents here. There are a couple regulars that show up on ballots every so often, one or two that have no visible signs of campaigns, and a couple good ones. Of the good ones, it boils down to Preeti Shridhar and John Persak for me, and if pressed, I will look at John Persak's union bonafides and give him the nod.

More later,