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Friday, October 23, 2009

Politics O’Brien Files Ethics Complaint Against Opponent

Posted by Dominic Holden on Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 4:27 PM

City Council candidate Mike O’Brien is filing a complaint this afternoon that asks the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission to investigate whether his opponent, realtor and landlord Robert Rosencrantz, and a group supporting Rosencrantz broke elections rules.

Both mailers after the jump

O’Brien says that Forward Seattle, a PAC funded overwhelmingly by building owners and real estate interests, violated regulations this past week by coordinating mail pieces sent to voters. “Both mailers are close to identical,” he says. The mailers include the same quotes about O'Brien's support for tolling roads and similar simulated photos of tolling stations on city streets. Election rules prohibit independent-expenditure campaigns from coordinating with the official campaign for a candidate. The pieces—which appear after the jump—were mailed at roughly the same time, O’Brien says, and every recipient contacted by O’Brien’s campaign received only one mailer or the other. “From our perspective, at least, it appears that there is some mail-list coordination,” he says.

At issue is an accusations that O'Brien, a former chair of the Sierra Club, supports tolling every single street in the city, but O'Brien says the comments about tolling have been exaggerated. "They have grabbed words out of my comments and highlighted them out of context," he says. In addition, he points out that Rosencrantz even supports tolling. "It is a good idea," Rosencrantz said in an interview with Friends of Seattle. "Corridor tolling systemwide is something we are going to have to have not only to have the revenue but also to regulate the demand."

Earlier this month, Forward Seattle had $110,844 in cash on hand, according to a report from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, and had paid Tulchin Research, a campaign pollster in California, over $26,000 this year. That may have been the unidentified polling firm that in mid-September called voters in Seattle, providing criticisms of Rosencrantz and O'Brien and asking the voters how those messages changed their opinions about the candidates. Here’s what we wrote a few weeks ago:

The group's leading contributors are the Building Owners and Managers Association and the Washington Association of Realtors. And Rosencrantz splits his career between high-end real-estate brokerage and owning apartment buildings. If it was Forward Seattle, and the group did find anti-O'Brien messages that resonate with voters, and it did want to back Rosencrantz, it could spend a huge amount on mailers and ads to push for Rosencrantz and smear O'Brien.

"I think in general [Robert Rosencrantz] is a nice guy but he clearly wants this really bad, and he is willing to do just about anything to get it," says Obrien. "That is just too bad."

Here's the Rosencrantz mailer against O'Brien:

The front of Forward Seattle's mailer:

And the back:

Comments (7) RSS

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You can't un-ring the bell.

Posted by Velveteen Robot on October 23, 2009 at 4:40 PM

Robert Rosencrantz can't be allowed to get away with this sleaze.

Posted by Your Name Hear on October 23, 2009 at 4:48 PM

I got one of these mailers. But not both.

Posted by Jakey on October 23, 2009 at 4:55 PM

I'm having trouble reading the poster. It appears to say "Rosencrantz is Stone Cold Crazy".

Posted by Fnarf

on October 23, 2009 at 5:48 PM

OBrian is another whiner.

He said it or implied it and does not ant any consequence?

He is another wacked out greenie - afraid that his shit will not become compost.

It will.... nature has a plan.

Voting for Bob R.

Posted by Zyler on October 24, 2009 at 8:14 AM

UGH! My wife voted for McGinn and Holmes... but then she voted for Rosencrampz. WTF?!

Vote for O'Brien, folks!

Posted by That's a weird ballot. on October 24, 2009 at 3:24 PM

I got the one with the black background, but not the purple one.

When I went to look up what O'Brien said (yikes? Toll everything everywhere?!! No thanks!) it turns he meant that if you toll the major corridors, some people will go off on side street to avoid the tolls. He said that you have to control that or else all the toll-cheaters end up clogging the side streets and residential neighborhoods, and one way to cut down on that kind of cheating is to have tolls on the places where people are trying to cheat on the corridor tolls. Oh. That's kind of different from what the mailer said.

I think Rosencrantz (this is his third time to try for this seat) is saying whatever he thinks will work to win. Yuck.

I'm voting for O'Brien.

Posted by Seattle mom on October 25, 2009 at 4:34 PM