Tag Archives: 2011 Sammamish Election

75% of voters reject Galvin tactics, “policies”

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Update, Aug. 19: Galvin continues his wild allegations. In another comment in the election story he takes my observation about his ridiculous commentary repeated below and leaps to a series of assertions about my “support” for Valderamma. In fact, there is no place, no where and no how in which I have indicated support for any candidate. I declared Wasnick the victor over Galvin, so by Galvin’s twisted logic it would seem I support Wasnick, too.

Why is Galvin anti-Valderrama? Because, perhaps, Valderrama as a leader of Citizens for Sammamish–a group Galvin tried to exercise a leadership role–shunned his tactics and style.

As for my comments vis-a-vis Valderrama and Galvin, I’m merely exposing Galvin’s continued hypocrisy and distortions.

Update, Aug. 18: Here is Galvin’s graceless comment from the story in the Sammamish Review directed toward the vote for Valderrama:

John Galvin on August 17th, 2011 7:00 pm

A clear message that the paper’s editor is eager to hide is that more people voted against Valderrama than for him.

There is a growing discontent with City leadership, with grandiose plans that are never implemented, with policies that deny the future and cling to the past. Valderrama will need to be more dynamic, more substantive, and more independent if he hopes to get elected.

I invite citizens to compare Valderrama’s campaign website with my campaign website.  Which site is more substantive? I know what the Growth Management Act is. I know the city’s comprehensive plan. . I have attended city meetings and forums since 2000 and know all the players. I’ve studied all the confusing city economic reports. I’ve dared to raise issues the city council was eager to ignore. The first round is over, but the fight has just begun.

Humble in victory, proud in defeat. Relentless!

I am more than happy to support those candidates who will bring new vision and energy to Sammamish.

Hardly “humble in victory.”

Original Post:

It’s all over but the shouting, as they say: 75% of those voting in the Position 4 primary rejected John Galvin and his tactics of intimidation, insults, hypocrisy, cry-babyism and his advocacy of policies that would pave over the Town Center and result in traffic gridlock.

It’s particularly noteworthy that Galvin, who had a high profile following his years of berating everybody he didn’t agree with, his constant whining in letters to the editor and his advocacy of building a “Bellevue Square” in the center of Sammamish without the remotest ability to build roads to accommodate the traffic, was thrashed by two candidates who were unknown to the public, save for some road signs and a couple of articles in the local papers.

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More intimidation, hypocrisy from John Galvin

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Sammamish voters received their ballots Friday/Saturday for primary day on August 16 for City Council. Voters have a choice in one race between Ramiro Valderrama, Jim Wasnick and John Galvin.

Galvin, of course, is the person who lectures Sammamish on proper procedures, only to flout the law when it comes to his own candidacy. He is also the master of hypocrisy.

As recently as May, Galvin was decrying campaign contributions by yours truly to past campaigns. In 2009, he attacked people who contributed funds to candidates they support. He attacked my wife’s campaign contribution, among others. This past May he claimed I had “financed” several city council campaigns.

Setting aside the bloviating over-statement of the word “financed” in this context, what does Galvin do when it comes to his own candidacy? Galvin filed for what’s called “mini-reporting.” This means he doesn’t have to reveal who is contributing to his campaign, or the amounts they “financed.”

Sammamish voters have no idea who is financing Galvin’s campaign or who is supporting him. Given his persistent criticisms and lectures about who supported and contributed to candidates he opposed, the hypocrisy is noteworthy.

Then there is the matter of his continual pattern of intimidation. I’ve already documented just two examples in the preceding post. I have two years of emails with many more examples.

But Galvin doesn’t stop there. In what is particularly egregious, Galvin on two occasions verbally accosted the wives of two planning commissioners with whom he disagreed.

Galvin is well over six feet and a stout individual. One of the wives is 5’9″ and height-weight-proportionate and the other, well into her 60s, is shorter. On these two occasions, Galvin accosted them as they were leaving commission meetings (and while their husbands were on the podium, unaware of the events until afterward) and began to berate them for actions of their husbands.

After the second incident, police were on hand at the following meeting to be sure Galvin did not repeat his inappropriate actions.

This is not an individual who should be on the city council or in any advisory role. It is worth noting that he once applied to for a position on the planning commission, and no council member supported his appointment. Furthermore, he applied for appointment to various town center advisory committees and no council member supported any of his previous applications.

These universal rejections of Galvin have nothing to do with his so-called advocacy of “inconvenient truths.” They are entirely because Galvin has an anger management issue (odd for someone who has a PhD in psychology who is a grievance counselor) and because of his history of verbal abuse toward staff, commissions and committees, anyone he disagrees with and the requirement for a time that police be present in case he goes into one of his inappropriate actions.

 

Whitten goes off the deep end on affordable housing

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It was a perplexing comment in The Sammamish Review profile of Nancy Whitten, seeking election to her third term on the City Council.

Here’s the bizarre portion of the article:

Whitten said she is also concerned about Town Center’s requirement that 10 percent of a development’s housing units be “affordable,” in that they can be rented by a family with an annual income of about $54,000. Having grown up in Chicago, she points to the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing project as an example of the downfalls of clustering affordable housing together.

“I question, socially, if we want to pack that much affordable housing in that small of an area,” she said.

I, too, am from Chicago (the Western suburbs) and know well the history of Cabrini Green. In the heart of Chicago, the place was a notorious housing project owned and operated by the City–not privately-owned units administered by a local organization like Seattle’s Arch. It was a densely-packed project for thousands of people of low income.

Chicago’s Cabrini Green. This is no Sammamish.

The affordable housing plan for Sammamish is a required 10% of the 2,000 units throughout the Town Center (with an option to go up to 20% of any given project), and families would have an average income of $54,000–which in their dreams, nobody residing in Cabrini-Green remotely made (except through illicit activities, perhaps).

The Chicago Housing Authority so mis-managed the “projects,” as it was known, and crime was so rampant, that the projects were eventually torn down.

Sammamish’s affordable housing plan doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to Cabrini-Green, and Whitten knows it.

In fact, the Town Center Plan doesn’t even remotely resemble the one once advanced by the Lake Washington School District, which owns 15 acres in the Town Center (not all of which is buildable). LWSD once proposed 144 units on this site, all of which would be affordable, for professions like teachers, police officers and fire fighters. Insofar as the proposal came very early in the Comprehensive Plan process, it was deemed premature and LWSD withdrew the plan.

The Town Center plan calls for a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 400 units, scattered throughout the 100 buildable acres.

What is Whitten thinking?