Our heart goes out to the families who weep in pain and who need family, friends and community support now more than ever in their lives.

Kellen Jones, Spenser Millard and Mike Turner died Sunday. An unnamed teenage girl remains in serious condition.

As the father of four young children, I can hardly contain my grief and terrible discomfort at this tragedy. My heart goes out to the families and to our community during this difficult time.

To lose a child raises one of the great moral questions in all of life: Dear Lord, why?

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

Today was a ton of fun and a real joy. Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson and I welcomed Governor Chris and First Gentleman Mike Gregoire to Ballard to tour the Nordic Heritage Museum and learn about their $65 million capital campaign to build a new community center along Market Street.

Many months ago the Nordic Heritage Museum folks came to Olympia to discuss their project. I casually suggested to them that we should invite the Governor for a visit and help us build momentum for our private fundraising efforts. The team grabbed the idea and ran with it! Today was the result and it was a real joy to see the excitement and sense of engagement as the Governor learned about the history of immigration and more of the five Nordic countries.

I had the honor of welcoming guests (including Councilman Larry Phillips) and helping to introduce the Governor. Our extra special guest was former Rep. Helen Sommers whom I have the honor of succeeding in the Legislature. I so appreciate the Governor’s time, energy and thoughtful effort to help us build community not only in Ballard but across our city and state.

There’s some good local blog coverage here and here.

Last night and tonight rallies across the city, state and nation are calling for health care reform. I was proud to stand with the Ballard community last night at a successful event organized by citizen activist Jo Ardinger who rallied the troops to engage in supporting the movement for health care reform.

Jo stepped up, engaged and connected with her neighbors. Hundreds of people turned out at the Ballard Commons Park to support the call. That’s citizen activism at it’s finest.

It was particularly powerful to see and hear the tributes, honor and reflection of the role and values of Sen. Ted Kennedy.

While I remain deeply committed to this challenge, I hope we have the courageous honesty to acknowledge our own obligation to expand the public dialogue to include the issue of health wellness, fitness and prevention. I’ve raised the issue many times and do not pretend it is either an answer or a distraction, only that health care as a system must include how we tackle health, wellness, prevention, weight loss and other preventable aspects of our own health.

Everyone deserves the dignity of health care.

Rep. Dickerson (left), yours truly and lots of others tour the north tunnel entrance area

More than 30 community leaders and organizations representing all sides of the deep bore tunnel issue came together in the sun Friday for a hands-on tour in Uptown (lower Queen Anne) to walk together, block by block, and gain a hands-on understanding of the proposed tunnel design issues and implications.

My legislative colleagues Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson and I worked to organize the tour after the Queen Anne Community Council, Uptown Alliance, Magnolia leaders, North Seattle Industrial Association, folks in Ballard and other area organizations throughout the entire 36th Legislative District raised serious concerns about the initial proposed design, and asked for greater participation from the public to get it right.

How and where will folks from Queen Anne, Magnolia, Ballard, Interbay and Fremont enter the tunnel? How and where will they exit? What about huge community events at the Seattle Center? Will traffic be a nightmare or is there hope? Is the Mercer Street project aligned with the larger strategy or not? Will freight and commercial vehicles have equal access along the key arterials? Will parking along congested streets be changed?

The thoughtful, insightful, tough and focused questions rattled on for two hours in the hot sun while traffic engineers from the city and state did their best to address the issues head on. Many questions don’t yet have answers and the public’s participation is essential to get it right.

The North Portal Working Group, a gathering of community organizations representing the neighborhoods of Queen Anne, Magnolia and Ballard, has been actively engaged in tackling these issues for months. Still, as a legislator, I felt a sense of personal frustration when looking only at maps and charts that didn’t help me get my hands around the details of these vital and important design issues. We must ensure traffic flow and access from the neighborhoods. Period. I wanted a better understanding of every turn, every new signal, the exact location of each aspect of the new tunnel not only to answer constituent questions but to make more informed decisions about the impact on our neighborhoods. In organizing the tour, Sen. Kohl-Welles, Rep. Dickerson and I felt it would help elevate the level of dialogue about the issues of congestion, traffic flow and access, and it did.

It’s easy to roll our collective eyes at the “Seattle Process,” and I’ve made my share of disparaging remarks about how long it takes us as a community to make bold decisions. But the walking tour, in providing a common understanding among previously warring parties, was a symbolic representation of the genuine and meaningful value of a decision making process that seeks common ground. Robert Moses, the famed New York City infrastructure czar who pushed through massive projects without a word edgewise from the community, would have scoffed at our community walk today. Standing on the street corner as cars whipped by on Highway 99, today everyone was aligned on one goal: To ensure our neighborhoods have genuinely improved traffic (auto, truck, bike, pedestrian) flow and access to, around and near the north entrance to the deep bore tunnel.

The 21st Century tunnel will impact our entire city and state for generations. The process has been long and hard, and we’re not done. Our area will see construction for nearly a decade and there are many decisions not yet made. But a nice walk around lower Queen Anne helped put a passionate, engaged, insightful group of community activists and leaders in a good mood for the challenges to come.

From myballard.com

The Burke Gilman Trail is a community treasure and we need to find a way to settle this lawsuit. At the same time, the biking community can’t simply dismiss the frustration of the commercial and freight folks in Ballard who see more and more pressure on their industrial core from a variety of sectors.

I know it’s a lot of money…I know it seems pie in the sky…but what about a really cool elevated bike path that would quickly become a wonderful community asset (to say nothing of pure fun for kids) and would show how to mix today’s commercial and recreational uses? Wouldn’t the win-win add a lot of value to our community? Can’t we move the BG trail over a block or two? Come on folks let’s get creative.

Public infrastructure that allows density to work with industrial jobs is more than a fantasy, it’s vital to our future.

I strongly encourage the parties to sit down together and work for a negotiated settlement to this important issue.

It’s not fair to put bikers in harms way of large scale trucks, while raising insurance rates for companies transporting rocks and other industry materials, and not look for alternatives.

The only winners in this one will be the lawyers until the folks on both sides get busy–together.

The Mayor needs to bring the parties together immediately and take some ownership of this one.

Today’s myballard.com post about GreenGo is striking in it’s simplicity and power. A wonderful, small mom and pop operation goes on the market not because they can’t get customers or manage employees or find capital, but because of the toll the small business is taking on the family. It’s a familiar story.

As an entrepreneur who has worked in my career with small and growing businesses, this post pains me almost physically. I can feel the hours of thrill to frustration Dylan and Heidi Stockman as they tell their story from excitement of the vision to the realities on the ground.

Running a small business is so damn hard you can feel the stress drip from the proprietors’ faces. You can sense the frustration and non sense of multiple permits, taxation rates for the city, county, state and federal governments. It’s not about being progressive or conservative it’s about creating a customer supplier relationship where the government allows small business to breathe before introducing the chaos of multiple permits, guidelines, rules.

If I do anything in Olympia for small business, it’s to realize that with every new policy, program and rule, there is a real customer on the other side who has to read the reports and figure out how to manage this new regulation in the midst of trying to actually run a business.

Last week the Washington State Labor Council released a report critical of House Democrats stating that we didn’t stand with them in supporting the labor agenda. I can appreciate their view, of course, and it was indeed stressful for them this year. Yet I’m struck by the 8 votes they selected to make their judgements. Four of them are associated with the controversial unemployment insurance issue and vote.

I voted “against” the official state labor position on the UI bill not because it was about Boeing versus the Machinists Union as portrayed by the inside Olympia crowd but because I believed that it was not in the interests of GreenGo Food and the other thousands of small businesses in our district and the tens of thousands statewide.

A lot of organizations claim to represent small business and all elected officials sing their praises as the number one employer in our state and nation. I took tough votes that have given me a 50% voting record with the state labor council and caused some to be upset with me. Yet I can’t and won’t do this job without staying true to what I believe is right for companies like GreenGo Foods. Yes we are a progressive district but no one–including organized labor–defines what that means in today’s world other than the people themselves.

The old fashioned idea that you can only be pro labor or pro business is beyond irrelevant and deeply patronizing for the entrepreneurs of the country building small businesses of all kinds with heart and soul. It’s patronizing to claim you represent working people but remain silent on important financial and business issues linked to running small businesses that make up the majority of employers. Labor needs to engage in building the economy of the 21st Century regardless of big versus small companies, not just the organized workforce. The profoundly important work of building a sustainable business–and doing so with your values and emotional connection to doing good in the world like GreenGo Foods–is a spiritually uplifting challenge. Success and failure is defined in entirely different ways.

From Ballardistrict.org

It’s a big deal. Join us.

Per myballard.com and Ballard News Tribune:

Viking Days Festival

July 11, 11:00am
The Nordic Heritage Museum’s annual Viking Days festival celebrates its 26th anniversary on July 11 and 12, 2009. This eventful weekend offers unique Scandinavian entertainment, food, arts & crafts merchants and real live Vikings only seen in Ballard! Our Taste of Scandinavia will represent each of the five Nordic countries featuring delectable edibles such as Swedish meatballs, Norwegian lefse, Danish æbleskiver, and a variety of Finnish and Icelandic goodies. The very popular Traditional Swedish Pancake Breakfast takes place from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets: $6 children, $8 members, $10 non-members. The famous Salmon Barbeque Dinner will be on Saturday from 5 pm to 7 pm. Tickets: $10 children, $12 members, $15 non-members.

During the legislative session there was a bill to prevent any ‘unreasonable’ regulation by a city from interfering with a church’s right to house the homeless. I was one of only six Democrats to vote against this measure in the House (it died in the Senate) because I was troubled by situations just like this. I feel that church’s do have an obligation to the neighbors to take all steps possible to ensure the right of the church to be placed in a residential neighborhood isn’t taken advantage of inappropriately. As a father of four young children, I just don’t understand why asking for a more formal system of background checks (rather than just an informal interview process) wouldn’t be seen as common sense.

Let’s hope King County’s 10 year plan to end homelessness can get additional traction and the state can step up to its responsibilities in this critical area.

http://www.myballard.com/2009/05/10/controversial-homeless-shelter-moving-to-ballard/

My central priority has been to ensure the traffic flow and access from Ballard, QA, Magnolia to the tunnel is as easy as possible. Second, I have worked to ensure the state maintains its obligations to fund the state highway portion of the project.

Here’s some coverage: http://publicola.net/?p=4930