By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

In a month with few community meetings, our area’s biggest political organization met to celebrate results of the last election, look ahead to the next one, and hear from current officeholders.

The 34th District Democrats‘ endorsed candidates fared well in the August primary, including Alexis Mercedes Rinck, the City Council citywide Position 8 challenger with a 12-point lead over appointed incumbent Tanya Woo (both will advance to November).

The only nailbiter noted at Wednesday’s meeting was the race for state Commissioner of Public Lands, with Republican former U.S. House Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler already locking in one general-ballot spot, while Democratic King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove hangs onto a less-than-a-tenth-of-a-point lead over Republican Sue Kuehl Pederson for the second general-election spot.

State House Position 2 Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon told the group that race is vital because Upthegrove would use a “science-based perspective to manage our public lands.” All in all, Fitzgibbon – who is House Majority Leader – declared himself “thrilled” by the primary results, even though, he noted wryly, his Position 1 counterpart Rep. Emily Alvarado got more votes than he did (barely – 329) in their respective re-election races. He said Democrats expect to add to their majorities in the State House and State Senate. And he noted his own household had added “a new Democrat” when he and his wife welcomed a baby in June.

Also briefly taking the microphone, our area’s Seattle Public Schools Board Director Gina Topp. With the new school year now three weeks away, she said the district is “working hard on safety” and she hopes for an update from the SPS administration at the board’s next meeting August 28. She also is hoping that’s when superintendent Dr. Brent Jones will present his long-anticipated plan for potential school closures/consolidations (it’s not on the agenda so far, though). “Difficult choices” are ahead, she warned.

Shortly thereafter, the meeting moved on to the agenda centerpiece, a Town Hall with King County Executive Dow Constantine and Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock, both West Seattle residents (“our administration is tilted toward West Seattleites,” he joked).

He introduced a sizable entourage of county officials they had brought along – including Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall, Undersheriff Jesse Anderson, new Department of Local Services director Leon Richardson, his predecessor John Taylor (who now leads the Department of Natural Resources and Parks) – plus others, including the new King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Dr. Kelly Kinnison. We recorded video of this section of the meeting:

Constantine opened with a brief overview of the $16.2 billion two-year county budget – most of which, he noted, goes to state-mandated services – and a complaint that revenue-limiting state laws dating back 20 years have kept revenues from keeping up with costs, and that legislators haven’t provided relief. He then switched topics to homelessness and brought up a controversy over an encampment in Burien. “We did not establish the encampment in Burien,” he insisted, saying that city has homeless people who “came to that site” and left the county with the choice of either booting them or trying to house them. The county chose the latter, he said, and has contracted with REACH to make contact with the people there and figure out what they need. He said that will take “four to six weeks” and then the site will be “restored.” He called the plan “humane … and necessary.” He also criticized Burien for not using $1 million and 35 tiny houses offered by the county to help with homelessness.

He moved on to note that the county is also dealing with asylum-seekers, but that issue didn’t have a side conflict like homelessness and Burien, so he moved on to talk about the local addiction crisis. It’s not exclusively a problem affecting unsheltered people, he noted – “people are suffering in homes too.” He brought up the Crisis Care Centers levy approved by voters and said one of those had opened in Kirkland. But the county is losing treatment beds rather than gaining them, Constantine warned, saying it had 300 beds and that’s now down to 244.

He also ticked off a variety of recent actions including establishing an “executive climate office,” the Doors Open program for arts/culture funding, adding more than 150,000 hours of Metro bus service at next month’s service change, getting ready to launch RapidRide G Line and Sound Transit‘s Lynnwood Link (he chairs the ST board), and the security crackdown Operation Safe Transit. Sheriff Cole-Tindall said that had been under way since May, with 90 arrests, and “we’re booking people into jail.” The sheriff declared that “the presence is a deterrent.” Undersheriff Anderson added that KCSO is using “co-response teams” in some situations too.

The floor was opened to Q&A. A Vashon Island resident said he was concerned that the county had told the social-services organization Entre Hermanos that it would not get a grant they’d been relying on. Braddock promised followup.

Former School Board Director Leslie Harris wondered if the Best Starts for Kids initiative could help fund mental health in schools, given the City Council’s pullback of half the $20 million funding it had promised. Constantine said he hadn’t been following that situation closely enough to comment, but observed that Best Starts for Kids is intended to help kids long before they have problems – it all “goes back to challenges that could have been addressed early on.”

Another question was from 34DDs’ board member Ann Martin, asking Constantine to comment on the importance of the presidential election. He agreed that “this is not just about wanting ‘our team’ to win,” but the way that local governments can “work hand in hand” with the White House, citing a “closer and deeper relationship” with the Biden/Harris Administration. He said he has faith that “Kamala Harris is going to … figure out how to use the power of the federal government to lift us all up.”

That ended the Q&A and segued into the presidential-endorsement do-over vote necessitated by the party’s change at the top of the ticket. The group voted to formally endorse the Harris-Walz ticket. They also voted to formally oppose Initiative 2066, contending “nobody’s coming for your gas stove.” And the group voted in favor of two resolutions – one supporting the app-based workers’ minimum wage, which the City Council is considering scaling back, and another supporting the city’s plan to develop low-income housing at the former Fort Lawton in Magnolia.

Most 34th DDs meetings are preceded by a pre-meeting presentation; for this one, it was about getting out the vote, highlighted by Postcards for Voters, which meets twice a week to write and send postcards to prospective voters in other parts of the country.

WHAT’S NEXT: Upcoming events announced at the meeting included the West Seattle Democratic Women‘s picnic on August 22, a pop-up social night at Georgetown Brewing on August 23, the 34th DDs’ annual picnic on September 7, and the next meeting September 11, which they say will be the last one they hold online. Watch their website for information on all of the above.