Tacoma City Councilwoman Connie Ladenburg said she thinks she has enough support from her colleagues to pass a resolution tomorrow that would let voters decide this fall whether to abolish term limits for Tacoma council members.

She better not be counting on a “yes” vote from Mayor Bill Baarsma

.

Baarsma told me this afternoon that he isn’t necessarily opposed to the idea of extending or removing term limits.

Baarsma actually served on the Charter Review Commission in the early ’70s that is responsible for

Read more »

The latest Elway Poll asked a random sample of registered voters what “GOP” meant.

Seven percent thought it meant Democrat. Another 18 percent either didn’t know or chose “other,” which means they didn’t know but couldn’t bear to admit it.

The remaining 75 percent thought it was synonymous with Republican. Correct.

Who cares? If you recall, gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi registered with the Secretary of State’s office as “Prefers GOP party,” instead of “Prefers Republican party.”

Democrats said he was trying to pull a fast one on voters. Rossi’s campaign said

Read more »

I joined Gov. Chris Gregoire at 7:30 this morning Rosa Vadillo’s home in East Tacoma. Gregoire had breakfast with Vadillo’s family before heading to Rita Madding’s house in Central Tacoma.

Vadillo is Madding’s home healthcare worker. She visits her home six days a week to feed her, change her bedding and take care of other things around the house that Madding’s disability prevent her from doing.

This morning, Gregoire helped prepare breakfast, restock Madding’s bedside snacks, cleaned out the bedside toilet and did other chores around the house. I’ll be writing about it for tomorrow’s paper.

Read more »

The Pierce County Council’s Rules Committee this morning killed a proposed ballot measure that would have asked voters to raise property taxes to preserve farmland and other open space.

By a vote of 3-0, the committee voted to postpone the measure – proposed by County Executive John Ladenburg – indefinitely.

Committee members cited unanswered questions, falling home values and a lack of accountability in the proposal as reasons to table it. They spoke of improving it and possibly trying again in 2009.

The proposal would have asked voters in November to raise property taxes by up to

Read more »

Looks like Pierce County isn’t the only local government with a controversial towing contract. The city of Everett is squaring off against tow truck companies over plans to change its police towing contract.

As we reported Saturday, some Pierce County towing companies have sued the owners of Gene’s Towing, which recently won the contract to provide services to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. The department previously used a rotation of more than 30 companies. Now it will use only Gene’s, which will subcontract some of the work to a few other companies.

About 20 other companies that

Read more »

As we reported last Sunday, Pierce County’s Chambers Bay Golf Course has struggled to meet budget in 2008. Looks like the course ended May even deeper in the hole.

County officials expect the course to lose money in the off season, and budget accordingly. They believe it will more than make up for those losses during the busy summer months.

But the hole this year is a little bigger than expected. Through May, the course had lost about $240,000 so far this year. That’s about $118,000 more than budgeted.

County officials say cool weather has meant

Read more »

We just got an e-mail from Lori Anderson at the Public Disclosure Commission. She says:

“The Public Disclosure Commission’s ‘search the database’ feature at www.pdc.wa.gov makes it easy to identify who is contributing to campaigns. Here is a comparison of the in-state vs. out-of-state contributions reported by the initiative committees so far…”

She then picks a handful of initiative committees and details their funding from in-state versus out-of-state donors.

“People for Safe Quality Care,” for example, (in favor of I-1029) has $389,742.88 from in-state donors and a big fat zero from out-of-staters.

Read more »

… including pocket pets to presidential candidate Barack Obama. Name-calling is fine by me, as long as you spell it right, which brings me to a letter I received from Mr. Obama today.

“Dear Nws Tribune,

Last February, in the depths of winter, our campaign took the first steps of an unlikely journey to change America.

…

Nws, I am writing to ask you to join your hopes for our country with those of millions of others by becoming a supporter of Obama for America.

…

Nws, I didn’t get into this

Read more »