Come January not one of those seven people will be on the Olympia Council. It’s a total council turnover in two years.
Mah, Ottavelli and Messmer opted not to seek re-election. Strub, Kingsbury and Machlis were defeated – based largely on their vote to increase height limits on the isthmus to allow mixed-use development. Hyer resigned when he was caught up in a marijuana sting operation where the informant was Kingsbury – Hyer’s former council colleague.
For all the drama on the Olympia City Council the last several years, it’s still a council very much in transition.
Steve Langer is changing council positions, so he will actually leave the council next month and miss the budget vote, only to be re-sworn into office for a different council seat in January.
Jim Cooper, who easily won a seat on the council in Tuesday’s election, will be sworn in on Dec. 8.
And when council member Stephen Buxbaum is sworn into office as mayor in January, that will create a council vacancy. It will be up to the new council to appoint Buxbaum’s replacement.
Jeannine Roe, who assumed her council seat two years ago this month, will be the senior council member come January.
That’s a long, anecdotal way of saying that inexperience is going to be a challenge for the next Olympia City Council.
While its true that new people do bring fresh ideas which can add to a council’s effectiveness and energy, when you have a council with so little experience, there is a loss of continuity and historical context. The council, collectively, lacks the knowledge of how and why previous decisions were made.
And it’s not just city councils that suffer from inexperience. All local council members serve on interjurisdictional committees that run key shared services such as Intercity Transit, the LOTT wastewater alliance, Animal Services, Medic 1, emergency dispatch, regional planning, etc. So those subcommittees lose institutional knowledge when new council members are appointed to serve – knowledge such as why the LOTT Alliance moved away from centralized wastewater treatment to the highly managed model that uses wastewater to recharge the aquifer and water area parks and open spaces.
What an inexperienced council ends up doing is relying on city staff members to fill in the knowledge gaps. Olympia councilors are fortunate that they can rely on a seasoned management team that has been in place for a number of years.
Lacey, on the other hand, has a similar inexperience problem at the council level, complicated by a brand new city manager, Scott Spence. He, fortunately, worked a number of years as assistant to long-time city manager Greg Cuoio so he knows community issues and players well.
At 14 years, Virgil Clarkson is the senior member on the Lacey Council. Jason Hearn, who won re-election to a second term on Tuesday, is second in seniority with four years. Newcomers Ron Lawson, Andy Ryder and Cynthia Pratt joined the council two years ago and Jeff Gadman was appointed nine months ago. With Tuesday’s vote tally, they’ll be joined in January by Planning Commission Chairman Lenny Greenstein who doorbelled almost every Lacey home twice to win 61 percent of the vote.
While Olympia’s first challenge is to appoint a new council member, Lacey’s first duty will be to select a new mayor from among the seven council members. The mayor’s position is elected in Olympia, appointed in Lacey.
In Tumwater, there likely will be no changes to the makeup of the council after Tuesday’s election results are certified. Councilman Ed Stanley easily won re-election and council member Joan Cathey is holding a razor thin lead over Planning Commission Chairwoman Debbie Sullivan.
Interestingly enough, South Sound is going to have its first elected husband-and-wife team in a number of years. Kim Reykdal breezed to an easy victory for an open seat on the Tumwater School Board while her husband, Chris, continues to serve as a state representative from the 22nd District. The last husband/wife duo were former Port Commissioner Jeff Dickison and his wife, Jeanette Hawkins, who served on the Olympia council.
Voters have spoken. They have hand selected the men and women to represent them. Every winner, whether a veteran or a newcomer, must prove themselves worthy of support before the next election.
