The campaign for Jan Drago, the City Council member running for mayor, sent out an email last night rebuking Mayor Greg Nickels for giving Seattle City Light Superintendent Jorge Carrasco a $40,000 bonus. That morning, the other leading mayoral candidate (after Nickels and Drago), James Donaldson, had made a similar statement. The attack coming from Donaldson seemed like a cheap-shot attempt at election grandstanding; Carrasco’s contract and job performance basically entitled him to the bonus. But the attack coming from Drago is simply mindfucking—Drago one of the nine city council members who unanimously approved that contract in 2004 and reinstated it on June 23 last year. If she didn’t want Carrasco to be eligible for a $40,000 bonus, why did she approve it when it was clear the country was in a recession—a recession everyone knew was growing deeper?

The answer, of course, is that paying Carrasco $200,000 a year plus a bonus makes sense (even though that's a shit ton of dough, of the likes I will never see). He runs a gigantic utilities department. He also gets paid $47,000 to $118,000 less than counterparts in other counties, and giving him a bonus is the way to retain him. Drago turning around and attacking the mayor for executing that contract in good faith is absurd.

“It’s rank opportunism in an attempt to capitalize on headlines at the expense of good government,” says Nickels campaign spokesman Sandeep Kaushik.

Drago’s explanation, oddly, comes from her city council office—not her campaign. One of Drago’s aides says that the mayor should have withheld any bonus because the economy is screwed and Carrasco’s bonus was discretionary (different that the mayor's office statement yesterday that the bonus was required). But the argument falls flat. According to the contract—again, the one that Drago approved—the mayor was empowered to issue a 10-percent bonus for hitting a four-year tenure and an eight-percent bonus for a job well done, such as streamlining the department and reducing its debt (Carrasco did both). According to the contract: “In the event that the Superintendent does not accomplish all specified performance goals, the Mayor, at his sole discretion, may approve a bonus of less than 10%, or no bonus at all, depending on the Superintendent’s performance toward achieving the specified long term performance goals.” (The clause on job performance read the same, except it used the 8% figure, and it adds, "Payment of an annual bonus is contingent upon the Superintendent achieving the performance goals negotiated with the mayor.") Carrasco by all accounts nailed his performance goals. So while the bonus is at the mayor’s discretion, giving nothing for a job well done is clearly not the contract’s intent. Denying him the bonus, as Drago proposes, would have been asinine—Carrasco could leave the job (and no qualified person would want to fill a position that low balls the salary and then provides no bonus for a job done well). Sure, paying a city official big bucks in a recession could seem weird at face value—but not as weird as Drago approving the contract and then flipping out at the mayor for executing it.