Ruston Mayor Michael Transue resigned at tonight's Town Council meeting, the Ruston Home blog is reporting.

Ongoing tensions between Transue and the council have boiled for months and apparently ultimately led to his resignation. Transue had a year left on his term.

"Our town government is presently functioning neither cohesively nor in a fashion that benefits the good people of our town," Transue wrote in his resignation letter. "A hostile, rancorus and sometiems ill-manned environment permeates many of our Town Council meetings and study sessions.

"I have worked hard to guide this council and our community and to provide thoughtful insight, but to little avail."

The town's government has undergone much upheaval in recent months.

Transue fired Police Chief Jim Reinhold in January after he disagreed with Reinhold's handling of a high-profile case of alleged electricity theft and the chief's run-in with a Town Council member who requested copies of public records from the case.

Two days later, Councilman Bob Everding resigned with two years left in his term. In his resignation letter, he called the town's government "presently dysfunctional."

We'll have more on our Web site Tuesday morning.

I've taken the liberty of rearranging parts of the news release sent out by the County Council today. There might be as many as a dozen charter amendments on the general election ballot.

Testimony today was led by Commission co-chairs Mike Lowry and Lois North, both of whom are former County Councilmembers. North was one of the freeholders who wrote the original charter. Voters who adopted the County Charter in 1968 provided for a citizen commission to be assembled every 10 years to review and propose charter updates to the County Council. The King County Charter is the foundation of county government and serves a role similar to that played by the U.S. Constitution.

The Council will continue its review of the proposed charter amendments with a special Town Hall meeting in Federal Way on Monday, June 16. The Town Hall, a special meeting of the Council’s Committee of the Whole, will be held at the Federal Way Community Center in the Community Room, 876 S. 333rd Street, Federal Way. The public is invited to meet face-to-face with King County Councilmembers at an informal reception starting at 6:00 p.m. The Town Hall will begin at 6:30 p.m.

For those of you who wondered what Mike Lowry was up to.

=> Read more!

Want to see Pierce County’s new ethics ordinance translated into the paperwork? Take a look at the county auditor’s new Public Disclosure Division web site.

The law requires lobbyists to register and disclose their salaries, monthly expenses and other information. The auditor’s site includes PDF versions of the forms the lobbyists must fill out. It also allows you to search an index of reports filed by elected officials and lobbyists, though you can’t download the actual forms they filed.

Auditor Pat McCarthy says her staff worked for three months to devise the forms and get the web site running by June 1, when the new ordinance took effect.

Some of you probably saw this one coming:

By RACHEL LA CORTE
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Seattle attorney and Democratic National Committee member David McDonald endorsed Barack Obama for the party’s presidential nomination on Monday, saying Obama has brought “astounding new energy and hope to the Democratic Party nationwide.”
McDonald, one of 17 superdelegates in Washington state, had been holding off making an endorsement until after this past weekend’s rules committee meeting in Washington, D.C. He was one of 30 members deciding what to do with the disputed delegates from Michigan and Florida.
McDonald said he felt it was important he remain neutral until that decision was made. The states were being penalized for holding their primaries in January when they weren’t supposed to vote until Feb. 5 or later.
The panel ultimately ruled to seat the disputed delegations, but gave each delegate only one-half vote rather than the full vote sought by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“This was not an easy choice,” McDonald said in an e-mail statement to The Associated Press. “Both of the candidates who remain in contention are capable of winning the general election and would likely do so if selected as the nominee.”
But Obama “has shown a remarkable ability to organize and mobilize Democratic voters and focus their efforts on the key task of persuading independent voters around the country to join us in changing the White House agenda.”
McDonald represented Gov. Chris Gregoire during the recount that followed her disputed 2004 election. Gregoire, another state superdelegate, also has endorsed Obama.
Obama now has the support of eight Washington superdelegates, while Clinton has six. Three remain officially uncommitted.
Obama leads Clinton nationally, and is less than 43 total delegates away from securing the nomination. If Tuesday’s final two primaries don’t put Obama over the top, additional superdelegates would have to supply the nominee’s final margin of victory.
The Democratic winner will then face Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

At the state Republican convention on Saturday, people started streaming out after the platform was adopted. It was somewhere north of 3 p.m., and delegates seemed worn down. The convention was scheduled to end at 5 p.m. anyway, and the stack of resolutions was thick.

But was there more to it than just tired delegates who didn't care about resolutions wanting to get home? Maybe. You tell me.

A delegate just called to tell me his theory – a theory I heard from a few others at the convention – that those who left were McCain delegates. Why would they leave? The caller said that what they cared about was getting their delegates seated and passing a serviceable platform. After that, they thought they could make a mass exodus and force the meeting to end (because there would no longer be a quorum... The problem: After they left, there was still a quorum, so the meeting went on for a bit. I digress.)

The caller told me something similar happened in Nevada and the King County Republican convention.

I don't know if that's what happened, and I can't speculate. But, if you were a delegate, maybe you know. And if you know, do you care?

This just in from Senate Republicans about Sen. Dan Swecker:

Swecker returns home from hospital after successful heart surgery

OLYMPIA… Rochester Republican State Senator Dan Swecker has returned home after being discharged Sunday from Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia. Swecker underwent open-heart surgery May 29 to replace his aorta valve.

=> Read more!

Here's a link to a month's worth of news releases.

Please check it out. Click on a few of the news releases. May 30 was a particularly busy day.

UPDATE: Try this link instead. They crossed me up. This link will show all of May's news releases. The other one just has those for June 2.

If I've done this right, you'll have links to find candidate filings for:

King County

Pierce County

Washington State

I'm working on a story about cell phones and driving and ran across this list of states where you can't talk on the phone while driving. (Actually, you can still talk on the phone, but you can't hold the phone in your hand. You must have a hands-free device.)

There's not enough room in the paper to print this whole list.

Washington's law will take effect on July 1. It is a secondary offense, which means you'd have to be doing something else wrong before you can be cited for talking on the phone while driving.

It's a $124 ticket.

California, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have statewide laws that make talking on a handheld cell phone a primary offense.

Here's a link to the Washington Secretary of State's page, showing which candidates already have filed for office.

UPDATE: And here's another link to get candidate filings in Pierce County. By state law, legislative candidates whose districts are confined to a single county, have the option of filing with the county auditor or the secretary of state. Candidates whose districts include parts of more than one county must file with the state.

Congressional District 6 (Clallam, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, Kitsap*, Mason*, Pierce*)

Norm Dicks (Prefers Democratic Party)

=> Read more!

It only took four years, and will probably do little to change anyone's behavior, but the case involving attack ads against Deborah Senn has ended. The U.S. Supreme Court decided against reviewing the case, which means the state Supreme Court decision stands.

The question in the case was whether a committee formed to pay for ads critical of a candidate must disclose the donors to the committee. Senn was a candidate for state attorney general, eventually losing to Rob McKenna.

Here is the Associated Press story from this morning.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court declined Monday to step into a dispute over a Washington state law that requires political committees to disclose the names of donors behind ads critical of a candidate for elected office.
The Washington Supreme Court ruled last year that a political committee backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce broke state campaign finance laws when it refused to disclose the donors behind ads in the 2004 state attorney general’s race.
The U.S. Chamber, working with a state group called the “Voters Education Committee,” paid for advertisements criticizing Democratic attorney general hopeful Deborah Senn during the 2004 primary campaign.
Voters Education Committee initially refused to register as a political campaign group with the state or reveal the source of its money. The committee later reported a $1.5 million donation from the U.S. Chamber, which in turn declined to reveal any of its donors, saying it didn’t raise any money specifically for the Senn campaign.
The justices did not comment on their action Monday.
The case is Voters Education Committee v. Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, 07-1153.