Work with Gary for More Community, Less Olympia

Imagine that a facility needs a night-watchman. Before anyone is hired, the bureaucrat asks, "How can we hire someone until we know if the job is a good use of the public's money and, before we can know that, don't we need to know what the job's responsibilities are?"

So the bureaucracy assigns two people in their planning department to work on the problem. One person does time studies. Another writes the instructions and specifications for the night-watchman job.

Much of my work for the last 30 years, first in my financial accounting software company and then in my training company, has been dedicated to helping organizations become more efficient by moving decisions-making out of bloated bureaucracies.  

I attended the Point Wells open house this week at the Shoreline Center. I was surprised to see my opponent there. She hasn't shown up at any of these events until now.

In talking to various people, such as Tom Andersen, head of the Richmond Beach Community Association, about this project, a frightening picture of the future of traffic in our area emerges.

Put the following pieces together:

It occurs to me that, though I am gratified by the number of votes I received in the primary, we as voters, should  be cautious of new faces and new policies.  As conventional wisdom puts it, the devil we know may be better than the devil we don't. This is why we talk about unintended consequences of new laws.  We should take our time to test new faces and new policies before we implement them. For the rest of my campaign, I will concentrate on letting voters get to know me gradually over time, even with so little time left, so they can vote with me in confidence.

Having qualified for the general election in November, I wanted to take a moment to thank the almost 11,000 people who have voted for me in your primary. Your support is very humbling and gratifying, especially for someone so new to politics, who has only been involved for only few weeks.

In the coming weeks before the election, I promise to work hard to win over your friends and neighbors to someone who represents their interest in our local community and not the interests of the bureaucrats in special interests in Olympia. 

I attended a lecture this morning by Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the new book, The Battle. His lecture made three points:

Ballots for the primary are being mailed the middle of this week. In response, we are getting together our resources for a joint literature drop for all three candidates in our district, Art Coday, David Baker and myself.  We are also setting up our first "robo-call," contacting people in our district. Between both efforts, we hope to contact virtually all of the voters in our district.

Today began with a trip to JB's audio studio in Mill Creek.  The objective was to record my first radio commercial for the campaign. You may have heard the result of our work when you first visited our site, if not, you can hear it again by clicking the play arrow below.

This was a week of highs and lows with a number of lessons learned. Just this minute I learned that our general election on November 2nd is a holiday. On the wall calendar that Becky just put up, it shows that it is the “Day of the Dead.” Though originally a Mexican holiday, it seems very appropriate for an election day.

I am totally exhausted. Yesterday, we drove over to Eastern Washington to visit my wife's father for Father's  Day. It is about a four hour drive.  When we got there, Becky, my wife, started preparing dinner and I mowed the lawn.  We had a great meal and visited until bedtime.

This morning, Becky and I woke up at 4am and started talking about the campaign. Two hours later, we still hadn't gone back to sleep, so we decided to get up.

This is the back of our new T-Shirt design. You see the front of the shirt at the end of the post. 

Putting the T-shirt design together was fun, but unfortunately not everything in a campaign (or life) can be fun and exciting. Today wasn't. It was dominated by a meeting with a campaign advisor doing some work for us categorizing areas in our district for work and another meeting with our campaign Treasurer.

News flash: our state's biggest spender wants to tax intangibles. Today I went to the Shoreline Chamber of Commerce meeting to start introducing myself to local business community. Met a lot of very bright, politically interested business people who have had to deal with state and local politics on regular basis. Makes me embarrassed at having a career where  I was fortunate enough to not have to worry about what politicians were doing to me. Great people. Want to learn a lot more about their issues.

Taking care of a lot of little stuff today. Little additions to website such as free ebook download for all who register.  Fixed a few little bugs, but still doesn't quite do what I want for donations.