Potential Volunteers can write us through our contact forms either on this ASLNL website that you’re now on or the Wards/Districts Initiative Website.
The wards/districts petition (Federal Way Citizens Initiative 24-003) is in dire straits. It’s basically written up for “Districts” to take effect after the 2027 Municipal Elections, so 2025 is the last chance to get it on the ballot (unless it’s rewritten, of course). It would effectively limit the terms of this year’s election for Council to 2 years instead of the usual 4. When Mark was writing it up, he found a reorganization statute that allowed for that (how else would you align for districts anyway without limiting some seats’ terms, temporarily, at some point, but it would have to be stated in the initiative before the election for that to take place)!
So, if the initiative passed the vote and legal scrutiny, as likely, the entire Council would be up for election in 2027, and the one singled-out “all-city” or “at-large” seat, #7, would have another two-year term before going to 4 years in 2029. The six “district” seats would have 4 year terms, as usual, in 2027. The City Attorney was, unfortunately, not allowed to give his opinion on the legal sufficiency of the initiative when he wrote up the title for the Initiative. He wrote to the sponsor, our Mark, a letter stating exactly that point (they used to be able to do that but no longer).
Now, Mark and the Party of Commons are doing all that we can to stop the metropolis that the government-run officialdom in Federal Way and King County are well along the way in building, brick by brick, little by little, ever so steadily, the building blocks of the new south-of-Seattle “Gotham”, that would make Seattle look like child’s play. Only we, with your help in passing the Initiative, thereby getting enough signatures on the petition, and making sure that we have a good outcome in the Federal Way Mayoral Election this year, can stop the metropolis.
One part of the overall Washington statutes that doesn’t work in our favor is the “6 month window” for collecting signatures, figuring that the deadline to get this on this year’s ballot is May 1st, more or less (by the way, the Council could sit on it for 45 days if they wanted to be cantankerous). Due to the necessity to have temporary term limits in the Initiative for the 3 seats up for election this year, this particular measure had to be given to the City Attorney for a title and signature collection soon enough to be signed off on by the Council by somewhere around August 1, 2025 or sooner, whether they simply approve it (like they should) or have it forwarded to Elections for a vote.
So, basically, because of the “6-month-window” rule and the poor signature rate of collection thus far, we’re going to FORFEIT (throw out) every one of the signatures we collected thus far and start from scratch in January of 2025. The best we can do to make up for that is write all of the people who signed before January (whose signatures will, effectively, be thrown out), and ask them to sign it again. Given the time window mandate, we pretty much don’t have any choice but to start anew (there’s no way we’re going to get all the signatures that we need much before May 1, 2025, if May 1st itself). At least we didn’t have anywhere close to enough signatures at the start of January, 2025, so, in relative terms, we’re not giving up a lot by starting a “re-sign” process.
We’re not throwing in the towel but if you have any good ideas between now and May 1st (for 8000 – 9000 signatures), we’re all ears. Lots of contributions would help us to get some stipend-paid signature gatherers. The 30th District Democrats’ big guy, Sam Rise, didn’t seem to be interested in helping us, and the Republicans are all but co-opted by the Stand Up Federal Way group, who now seem to be “backing”, to put it nicely, the pro-metropolitan Ferrell & Council. To get around them, to put it simply, we need volunteers and/or money in order to get this on the ballot by the effective May 1st-or-thereabouts deadline. If we had enough of one or the other (volunteers or money), even without the other, that would be good enough to get the job done, but we have to have one or the other, preferably both.
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