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On Sheriff Oversight, Strong Mayors And Needled Workers: The Week's Underreported Stories

Space Needle
AP Images

Each week on Sound Effect we invite a panel a journalists to talk about local stories they feel didn't get sufficient attention.

On this week’s show we invited Hannah Brooks Olsen of the news and politics blogSeattlish,Rachel Lerman, the Seattle Times’ technology reporter and Derek Young, founder of the Exit 133 blog about Tacoma.

For Lerman, it was the past week’s King County  Office of Law Enforcement Oversight meeting. The LEO is a civilian committee that investigates complaints about the county Sheriff’s department.

The county auditor’s department released a report saying the Sheriff’s office had too much control over what is supposed to be an independent committee, calling it a conflict of interest.

“The Sheriff’s office is denying that,” Lerman said. “Now it’s up to the King County Council members what they want to do.”

Young said in Tacoma, it was the initiative to change the city’s form of government from council-manager to strong mayor.  In a council-manager structure, the council hires a city manager who runs the day-to-day operations of the city. The mayor’s influence extends only to policy.

In a strong mayor system, such as Seattle, the mayor oversees all of the daily operations and hires (and fires) top administrators. The council helps set policy.

“It would be a tremendous change,” Young said.

But after the initiative was filed, its backers noticed serious and unintended flaws in the legal language. It is the second time an unintentionally flawed initiative on the subject has come before the voters, leading some to call the restructuring, “cursed,” Young said.

“We’ve not been able to vote on this as a city since the early 70s," he said.

Olsen said simply look up in Seattle to see her under-reported story.

“I’m fascinated with what’s going on at the Space Needle from a labor standpoint,” she said.

A hospitality union represents about half of the Space Needle employees, she said. But these employees have not had a contract since 2012.

Federal mediators have been called in and the Needle owners have been accused of union busting.

“There are people who are working at the Space Needle who have not gotten a raise in three or four years,” she said. “Which is Seattle’s economy is a lot.”

Subscribe to Sound Effect's podcast on iTunes, and you can download episodes of the show, as well as a separate breakout of our under-reported stories. Write us a review while you're there, or send feedback to SoundEffect@KPLU.org.