Dori: Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan should resign after email scandal

I think Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan should have to resign after this major story. The Seattle Times has released the details of how a group of Jenny Durkan’s staffers and Democratic political consultants used private email accounts to plan what to do after the head tax turned out to be such a disaster.

The staffers include: former spokesperson (and now Chief of Staff) Stephanie Formas; Deputy Mayors Mike Fong, David Moseley, and Shefali Ranganathan (former director of the Transportation Choices Coalition, that scam operation that has infiltrated our city government); and political consultants Sandeep Kaushik and Kelly Evans. They used private Gmail accounts to discuss the head tax. They did a lot of their communication outside of assigned City of Seattle email accounts to avoid potentially having to hand over their conversations through public records requests.

But the Washington state Public Records Act is very clear about the responsibility of government when it comes to sharing information with the public. The act requires public agencies to “make available for public inspection and copying all public records.”  This means “any writing containing information relating to the conduct of government” – AKA emails about a very prominent and contentious new tax.

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When people like our friend, attorney Lincoln Beauregard, have tried to get these public records, the city tried to withhold these private emails. You are talking about a blatant attempt to get around Washington’s Public Records Act, a law that was designed to ensure that lawmakers are transparent.

If we had any guts at all, we would demand Jenny Durkan’s resignation over this. When you have a mayor who is operating a stealth government to avoid any public detection, it’s time to get rid of her.

I’ve told you from the get-go that Jenny Durkan is a robot on the surface, but below that surface, she is quite the manipulator. She wants to be a senator or governor — the mayor’s office is just a stepping stone. That’s the problem with politics. Jay Inslee is governor because he wants to be president. Bob Ferguson is the attorney general because he wants to be governor. Durkan is mayor because she wants to be a senator or the governor. And they will stop at nothing, including going around Washington law to operate out of the public eye.

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