Kitsap Caucus

We’ll have a full story on this. Senate Democrats are seeking a more cooperative chamber with Republicans this year. The party announced its leadership today. Republicans can object, and they’re scheduled to pick their leadership on Wednesday.

Locally the new Democratic leadership in the Senate means more work for state Sen. Tim Sheldon, D-Potlatch. Sheldon said a couple years ago he was removed from an energy committee by former Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown. With Ed Murray in charge, Sheldon is back on that committee and is also the party’s pick for President Pro Tempore, which means he holds the gavel when Lieutenant Governor Brad Owen can’t.

Sheldon said Brown and Murray just have different styles.

State Sen. Christine Rolfes will chair the Environment & Growth Management Committee following state Sen. Sharon Nelson’s placement as Vice-Chairwoman on the Senate Ways & Means Committee.

The party’s press release follows:

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Bret Treadwell, who filed on the last day to do so as a Republican running against state Sen. Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island, has decided to not pursue the seat.

Because his decision comes after the deadline, which was May 21, his name will still appear on the primary and general election ballots.

Treadwell said he won’t be campaigning at all, however, and won’t have any information in voters’ guides. The former candidate said his decision to run was made quickly and up against a deadline. “It was kind of a last-minute decision with some folks kind of enrolling me in the last 12 hours,” he said.

When filing week ended Rolfes had two opponents. D.J. Sweet withdrew on May 21. With Treadwell’s all-but-official withdrawal from the race, it essentially leaves Rolfes running alone for election to the seat she was appointed to in July of 2011. Rolfes jumped from the state House to the Senate when former state Sen. Phil Rockefeller, another Bainbridge Island Democrat, resigned to take a position with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

Treadwell first indicated he was considering withdrawing after I contacted him for a story I’ll be writing about candidates with bankruptcy history. Treadwell filed for bankruptcy in 2009 while he was going through a divorce.

On Friday he said he filed for bankruptcy protection because the debts he incurred were part of a business he was going into. Rather than focus on that business, he said, he spent his energy getting joint custody of his two sons. He said he is still putting his life back together financially and is also engaged to be married to someone new. “I can’t see my message being heard over the drama of my own personal junk i’m dealing with,” he said. “I don’t want to put my family through this.”

Treadwell said he wasn’t interested in politics until started looking into the issues presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, was emphasizing. Treadwell said someday he might like to try again, taking that same emphasis and applying it on a state level.

Chris Dunagan’s story about the Legislature’s help with cutting the cost of the purchase of 7,000 acres in North Kitsap has behind it a tremendous lobbying effort taken on by legislators and citizens just to get the bill heard in the state Senate.

Those involved shared e-mails. Someone shared with us the exchanges of e-mails and I’ve done the work to pretty much show them to you in the order they happened. I took out the names of the 67 people who were CC’d on the e-mails, in large part because we would love to continue receiving e-mails like this in the future if someone finds a string that illustrates a story like this. I found out a couple of years ago that legislator e-mails are not public record. There are local officials in the mix here, so all these e-mails would be public record, if you’re interested in doing a record request through the county or city of Poulsbo.

We’re including the e-mails to tell a story of what was happening behind the scenes, the events illustrated in the following part of Dunagan’s story:

Sen. Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island, said the bill got hung up because it appeared to affect only a small group. But, with the clock winding down, lobbyists from timber companies, environmental groups and local governments joined together, along with many local supporters. They pushed Senate leaders to move the bill to a vote, which was unanimous in the Senate after only one dissenting vote in the House.

“It took teamwork,” Rolfes said, “but it was very easy to say that everyone wants this.”

Jon Rose, who is spearheading the land deal for Pope Resources, said the legislation shows how people can make things happen when they need to.

“This was one of the best examples of a diverse group of Kitsap County residents coming together for a positive result,” he said, “and I would like to see more of it.”

The evidence follows.

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In 2006 voters in the 23rd Legislative District received mailers asking the question, “Beverly Woods went to Olympia and what did we get?” Woods, a Republican, was first elected to the seat in 2000, beat Democrat Sherry Appleton by 4 percentage points in 2002 and in 2004 she won handily over a candidate who did not campaign with much intensity.

In 2006, though, she faced off against Democrat Christine Rolfes, a former Bainbridge Island city councilwoman. Rolfes ended up winning by 9 percentage points. A blog post just weeks after the election at the conservative site Sound Politics had in its comment string a conversation blaming Woods’ loss on her vote for a gas tax. Many people have said to me the same thing, that Woods lost her base when she voted for that tax.

However she lost, the mailer is the issue here, because it was created by a firm that finds itself in hot water with the Washington State Attorney General, Rob McKenna. Moxie Media is being sued by McKenna for the company’s under-the-radar efforts to oust a conservative Democrat in the 38th District in 2010. It’s the under-the-radar part that could get them in trouble, because the company allegedly created political action committees to temporarily hide the liberal money (labor, trial lawyers, etc.) that was pitching a conservative Republican who was not running a strong race. The effort helped put the incumbent, state Sen. Jean Berkey, in third place, virtually guaranteeing victory in November for Democrat Nick Harper, who as of Tuesday had received nearly 60 percent of the vote.

Moxie is not the only organization to run afoul of Public Disclosure laws in recent history. The Olympian’s Brad Shannon wrote, “The action against Moxie comes in the same season that the Republican-oriented Building Industry Association of Washington settled charges of concealing funds it later used to promote Dino Rossi’s 2008 gubernatorial campaign.”

The Washington State Wire has an explanation of what went on with Moxie and Berkey, explaining the money gets hidden.

Moxie Media’s anti-Bev Woods piece is one of several the company highlights in a portfolio on its Web site.

Of the campaign the company writes, “After many failed attempts by other Democratic campaigns to define State Representative Beverly Woods as too conservative for her district, Moxie Media ultimately helped defeat the three-term incumbent. We developed a series of five mail pieces that positioned Woods as ineffective and out-of-touch, helping to elect our client, State Representative Christine Rolfes, who has held the seat since 2006.”

The work Moxie did for Rolfes was pretty straightforward. Sure, some of it in 2006 was negative advertising, but there do not appear to be any obvious efforts to hide who was behind the ads. A search of Public Disclosure Records show that over three campaigns Rolfes has spent $61,625 for Moxie Media’s help.

Rolfes said the recent news does have her considering who she will employ in the future. “I had never seen them do anything that wasn’t above board. I’m disappointed to see how that company worked in another race,” she said.

Moxie’s work has showed up in other local races. In 2006 the company promoted Kyle Taylor Lucas, who tried to best state Sen. Tim Sheldon for the Democratic nomination for senator in the 35th District. The company was paid more than $50,000 from three different PACs, all of which had “Have Had Enough” in the name.

In 2006 the Harry Truman Fund, which supports Democrats, spent about $17,000 for ads against Republican Ron Boehme, who ran against Larry Seaquist in the 26th District.

In late October Bremerton Republican Trent England wrote on the Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s Liberty Live blog, “I happen to know that Moxie works for my own State Senator Derek Kilmer, who pretends to be a Berkey-style moderate, but somehow still gets props from the far left (draw your own conclusions about who is the real Derek Kilmer: the one familiar to his Moxie pals, or the one he presents to voters in his swing district?).”

It is true that Moxie shows more than $200,000 in receipts for Kilmer’s campaign between 2004 and 2006. There were none, however, in 2010.

Kilmer said he worked with John Wyble, who co-founded Moxie, but left in 2008 and formed his own firm, WinPower Strategies.

Kilmer took issue of England’s use of the word “works.” “Once again Trent England hasn’t done his homework,” Kilmer said, adding that the ads he pays for do not mention his opponents. “The way I approach campaigns is like a job interview. “I’ve never gone into a job interview and said ‘This is why you shouldn’t hire the other guy,’” he said.

Democrats generally have condemned what is alleged to have been done in the 38th. Berkey, for her part, is asking that the Legislature not seat Harper, saying the election was tainted, according to a (Everett) Herald story.

Rolfes, who did work with Lisa MacLean, the Moxie founder named in the Attorney General’s suit, said she hopes the discovery of what happened with Moxie is evidence that the system worked. “The whole point of the Public Disclosure Commission is to allow a forum for catching these kind of indiscretions and unethical and possibly illegal acts,” she said.