This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

In the middle of the hardest economy most of us have known, the citizens of Pierce County on Tuesday approved a new tax. A sales tax, no less, to pay for better 911 system.

OK, it wasn’t a big tax – just an extra penny on a $10 purchase. But it wouldn’t have had a meatball’s chance in a pack of Rottweilers if citizens hadn’t been persuaded they were getting value for their money.

In this case, the value was considerable:

A unified countywide dispatch system to replace the balkanized hodgepodge of agencies that now handle emergency calls. A 21st-century digital radio system to replace aging and obsolete technology. Police, firefighters and dispatchers who can locate and talk to each other across Pierce County in a seamless communications system.

Proponents were selling something easy to understand – public safety – and voters bought it.

Like the election results or lump them – and we lump some of them – Washingtonians were persuaded by clarity when they filled out their ballots.
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In the past few years, Puyallup City Council meetings have become notorious for contention and disruption. Some of the candidates running for election this year go so far as to call it “embarrassing.”

After the Nov. 8 election there will be at least three new faces on the council. “Works well with others” isn’t usually at the top of the list of candidate qualifications, but it should be a consideration in this case. Policymaking bodies can’t do their best work without a modicum of civility and decorum.

Here are our choices for the contested positions:

At-large: Steve Vermillion is, hands down, the best qualified of the candidates for this seat.

His opponent, Nicole Martineau, was appointed to the council early last year, and she’s done a reasonably good job. Much of her involvement in city affairs has come recently. Vermillion has formidable credentials, including a career as a highly decorated retired military officer.

The tone of Vermillion’s campaign has disappointed us; it’s been nasty at times. But there’s no denying his leadership qualities and impressive qualifications for the council.

District 1, Position 2: We endorsed downtown businessman and Puyallup Mainstreet director John Hopkins in the primary, and he still has our support. A gracious, intelligent chap (he’s a naturalized citizen from Great Britain), he likely would contribute to a more temperate atmosphere.

That wouldn’t be the case with his opponent, retired railroad employee Tom Smillie. At a notorious 2009 council meeting, he was one of the citizens who began shouting at council members so angrily that the police were called in.

According to the videotaped recording of the meeting, Smillie said, “You people want to be un-elected? You just signed your death warrant as far as that goes . . . I will march until the soles of my shoes have holes and blood runs out the bottom, and you won’t get elected again.”

Smillie later stormed out of the meeting while pointing at four members of the council and said, “You’re done, you’re done, you’re done, and you’re done.”

Scary guy. Smillie is temperamentally unfit for any public office. Voters should elect the affable and well-informed Hopkins.
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Here’s the polite way to put it: Voters who’ve done their homework on the candidates and issues deserve a warm glow of civic virtue as they fill out their ballots.

A less polite version: Citizens who don’t have a clue should either educate themselves or leave the job of self-government to the better informed.

Consider the unfortunate fact that Will Baker and Robert Hill are the sole challengers of, respectively, Ryan Mello and Lauren Walker, sitting members of the Tacoma City Council.

Baker and Hill both have criminal records. Hill stalks women, has grave mental health problems and appears fixated on guns. Last December, he was convicted of stalking; in 2008, he was convicted of felony forgery.

Despite the forgery conviction and a string of arrests, Hill ran for Pierce County sheriff that year; he finished far behind Sheriff Paul Pastor but won 52,000 votes and beat out a third candidate.

Repeat: 52,000 people in Pierce County voted for a felon instead of a professional law enforcement executive. Maybe they liked his name.
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Fantastic news for Tacoma: Two extraordinary candidates, Dexter Gordon and Karen Vialle, are running for school board. We endorse both enthusiastically. Here’s why:

The Tacoma School District – like many urban school systems – wrestles with tough social problems. It teems with poor and otherwise disadvantaged schoolchildren who struggle with academics and often wind up as dropouts despite the valiant efforts of their teachers.

Poverty and troubled home lives bedevil many children. As in many cities, the dropout rate among black and Latino youth is intolerably high. The district needs high-powered school board members who will lie awake nights thinking about student performance and demand results from everyone in sight.

Gordon, who is seeking Position 3, and Vialle, seeking Position 5, are made to order.

Both have worthy rivals.
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It’s settled: The crypto-political action groups that package their ads as “issue advocacy” in this state will still have to disclose their donors and donations.

Human Life of Washington fought that requirement all through the judiciary; it lost for good last week when the Supreme Court rejected its appeal of a prior loss in the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals.

The case was a little peculiar from the start.
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The News Tribune and its predecessor papers have run election endorsements for a lot longer than I’ve been here – way back into the 1800s, probably. But some people are always shocked and annoyed when we start publishing them.

We have standard explanations for why we endorse. The best is that The News Tribune’s opinion pages comment on issues affecting the South Sound all year long. Our editorial board isn’t going to suddenly go silent when it comes to choosing the leaders who will – for good or ill – shape the region’s future.

Voters can do what they please with our endorsements; most probably ignore them. But we’ve got as much interest in who gets elected as, say, the Labor Council, the Municipal League or the Republican Party. We also work hard to educate ourselves; we try to interview every serious candidate in every race we get into.

Another explanation has to do with history. Newspapers have always made election endorsements. Before the Civil War, in fact, virtually all newspapers existed to promote political parties, religious beliefs or other causes. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that they shouldn’t make endorsements. They often put them on the front page.
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You can’t fault the King County Municipal League for lack of transparency. Below is a memo we got yesterday from state Sen. Pam Roach, a Republican running for re-election in the 31st District.

From the looks of it, this conservative Republican will be facing a panel of two conservatives, one centrist, three liberals, two “very liberal” liberals and two who describe themselves as “left of center.” Seven identify themselves as Democrats, none as Republicans.

 
I was contacted by the Muni League to set an interview date. In the past I have gone in with all the extraordinary things that I have done for constituents, district efforts led, my efforts in Honduras, local endorsements…etc. I spent hours gathering things up..driving to the interviews (sometimes as far north as Fircrest) and I was never the token Republican “superior than my opponent” candidate.

After they left several messages I decided to call them. I told the nice young-sounding lady that in the last interview there were two trial lawyers on the interview panel and my opponent was, in fact, a trial lawyer. That, I said, did not seem too fair to me. I asked if I could see this year’s panel members assigned to my race….. I can’t believe she actually sent it! 

Here’s the response from Brit Sojka of the Municipal League of King County:

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Veterans of Iraq – at Fort Lewis and elsewhere – can stand even taller after Sunday’s elections in that once-bloody country.

By any standard, the vote was a success. The turnout, 62 percent, far exceeded the turnout in U.S. congressional elections and equaled that of the 2008 presidential election. Iraqi candidates and political parties had campaigned fiercely – with rhetoric, not bullets and bombs. The voting by and large looked clean and honest.

Roughly 40 Iraqis were killed in election-related violence, as many as half the fatalities occurring in a single rocket attack that brought down an entire apartment building in Baghdad. But that’s a calm sunny day compared to the sectarian massacres Iraq was enduring several years ago.

The rocket attack and other explosions in Baghdad didn’t intimidate voters; they reportedly spurred more people to vote. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi security forces – not American troops – controlled the streets and appeared to thoroughly cow what remains of the once-powerful insurgent forces. Except for a few brief closures, polls remained open all day throughout the country.
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