What Comes After Legal Pot and The $15 Minimum wage? pre-K, parks district? High speed internet? Bike Racks?
Public-Campaign Financing
Watching the disaster that is ungovernable Olympia and Washington DC, to get things done attitude in Seattle is amazing!
Led by Mike O’Brien , the Seattle Council members on the Seattle city council preparing initiative for public financing of candidates for city office.
A similar initiative failed last year, with only 46 percent of the vote . s Since t time, however, Seattle has changed Council elections to represent individual districts within the city. Of course the next Council election will be local . As a result, the costs of campaigns within a district will be much less than citywide. this means that a public financing budget could be very much within the range of “doable.”
Councilman O’Brien explained, “This current Supreme Court is taking any number of steps to erode any regulations establishing campaign finance restrictions,” “One of the concerns is that the Supreme Court would ban restrictions on contributions, period …” However, at least as I read the legal commentary on the bizarre decision of the Supreme Court , their ruling was based on the idea that restrictions on spending could only be made if there were evidence for corruption in the political process .
so the trick with a public financing law in Seattle’s co Council elections it may be writing a lot that would still allow contributions but would make those either embarrassing or sufficiently difficult to create a real concern about corruption . For example, the SCOT decision was justified by the claim that the government presented no evidence that large expenditures of money corrupted the political process . Seattle’s law might be written to avert such corruption since the cost of the Council election is sufficiently small and since we have more than a few people with enough money to buy such an election. In other words, the law might be writtsoldas a public financing law but as a law against the purchase of an election .
he measure, O’Brien says, could be on the ballot as soon as this coming October.