This editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition.

The Democratic Party’s list includes two solid candidates for outgoing auditor Pat McCarthy’s job.

Local Democrats just shot two big holes in the theory that a partisan nomination process necessarily favors party hacks.

Pierce County’s Democratic Central Committee met Saturday to select its nominees for the soon-to-be vacant Pierce County auditor job. The party’s top two choices should put to rest any concerns Pierce County Council members have about using a party list to fill what will soon become a nonpartisan position.

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This editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition:

There’s a spate of new sexual harassment lawsuits at Western State Hospital, and state officials – to their credit – are openly acknowledging that harassment is a problem there.

Have we stepped into a time warp? Here’s what we wrote about the very same issue at the Lakewood psychiatric hospital more than 5½ years ago:

A man or woman with no sense of boundaries is not unusual. What is unusual, at least in the last couple decades, is a state agency – run by people who supposedly know better – that seems utterly incapable of stopping a serial harasser.

That was a response to the infamous Barrette Green harassment case. Here’s a quick summary of the case, which is all too relevant to the new lawsuits:

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We are pleasantly surprised by county Democrats' nominees for replacing Pat McCarthy, who is leaving the county auditor's job to become county executive.

Apparently so was their top pick, Katie Blinn, who is the state's assistant director of elections. Blinn told me today that in the days leading up to Saturday's selection process, she kept hearing from local Dems that she was such a great candidate – if only she had stronger ties to the party.

Blinn considers herself a Democrat but she is prohibited from participating in party politics to avoid tainting her job as an elections official. She faced similar restrictions in her previous position as nonpartisan counsel to the state House of Representatives.

Her runner-up is Julie Anderson, who is perhaps a better known Democrat but also no mere party pick. Anderson has been an effective and hard-working member of the Tacoma City Council; her name seems to pop up anytime there is talk of a vacant position (or an incumbent past his or her prime).

The Democrats played this one wisely. Had their front runners been more partisan than professional, they would have given the County Council the perfect excuse to ignore them.

Here's another community corrections officer (I can't share her name) who has deep concerns about the "low risk" and "nonviolent" offenders who would go unsupervised under Gov. Chris Gregoire's budget plan:

I am a community corrections officer with the Department of Corrections. I have over seven years experience supervising a caseload of sex offenders, with the main body of my case load made up of Level 3 sex offenders.

The governor's proposal of not supervising low- and moderate-risk offenders does not encompass the type of offender the public would assume it does. The tool the Department of Corrections has begun to use was only normed in this state, and is not used nationally to rate offenders.

There are many flaws in the tool. As we go through our caseload and assess the offenders with the new tool, we are coming to find that many offenders who in the past have been supervised at a high level are coming out low or moderate.

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Look for Pierce County's new executive, Pat McCarthy, to push for a new election on ranked-choice voting after she takes office. The idea is to repeal it.

Here's an oped we'll be running Wednesday:

Dec. 22, 2008
By Pat McCarthy

Now that our first experience with ranked-choice voting is behind us, it may be useful to get a point of view from the trenches.

Let me start with the survey the auditor’s office mailed with the general election absentee ballots. Voters were asked how they felt about their ranked-choice voting experience. The results couldn’t be clearer. Sixty-six percent disapproved. With 90,000 voters responding, I believe that’s an accurate representation of how Pierce County as a whole feels about RCV.

I must confess I agree. Ranked-choice voting is expensive, complex and time-consuming. However, after receiving the mandate in November 2006 to implement it, the auditor’s office began making good on the promise I made before the Charter Review Commission and Pierce County Council back in 2005.

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A new proliferation of lawsuits suggests that Western State Hospital still hasn’t rid its culture of sexual harassment.

Democrats have taken away the one excuse the Pierce County Council might have had in running its own nomination process for filling Pat McCarthy's soon-to-be vacant auditor's post.

If you have comments or questions about these topics, please email them to patrick.ocallahan@thenewstribune.com. Editorials represent the consensus view of The News Tribune's editorial board.

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