Eugster not running, but not done

Former Spokane Councilman Steve Eugster caused a brief stir among former City Hall colleagues by filing a candidate registration form for the upcoming municipal elections.

Admittedly, it caused a stir among the press corps, too, who may have secretly been hoping for Eugster to infuse a little spice into what could be a pretty bland election season if the mayoral recall doesn’t reach the ballot in 2005.

But a few days later, Eugster told The Spokesman-Review he’d changed his mind and was not going to run.

Instead of running again for council, Eugster said he wants to concentrate on a major overhaul of local government. He has even started a new Web site ( www.spokanecharter.com) to discuss the options and possibly recruit like-minded activists.

The attorney-turned-activist has a couple of possible changes he’s kicking around. One is a home-rule county charter, which has been discussed off and on for years, and a version of which was drafted by elected freeholders in 1994. The other is a joint city-county government that could accomplish what is Spokane’s political equivalent of Mark Twain’s riff on the weather: Everyone talks about it, but nobody ever does anything about it.

Eugster’s idea – intriguing if doable – is to draft two proposals, find adherents of either, recruit them to run for freeholder with the promise to support their preferred stance, then convince them to follow through if elected.

He has a personal favorite, and here’s the real shocker: He’s leaning toward an elected seven-member county council, with an appointed, professional administrator/executive.

That’s right, the godfather of Spokane’s strong mayor charter amendment has come almost 180 degrees on the selection of top government executives. In his view, the last three occupants of the mayor’s office – two elected under the new system, and one when Spokane still had a city manager – all failed to measure up in one way or another.

Beyond that, he’s toying with a run for state Supreme Court, but a seat doesn’t come up for election until 2006.

“I need to be back in public life,” he said, but not on the council.

Rhyme time

Several inquiring readers want to know what the poem was that retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor used to wrap up her conversation with the judges and lawyers at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court conference last week.

It’s a bit of self-deprecating verse, titled “The Indispensable Man,” which appears on the Internet under several other titles and is attributed to several authors. But the best claim of authorship belongs to Idaho poet Saxon White Kessinger. Poem and other details can be found at www.appleseeds.org/Indispen-Man_Saxon.htm.

One of the key images it uses is a bucket of water, and the hole your fist leaves in that volume of liquid when you put it in, then pull it out. Nice image, no?

Not how you solve a problem named Maria

Sen. Maria Cantwell, up for re-election next year, is being targeted by opponents of the Estate Tax as a key vote in permanently repealing what they like to call THE DEATH TAX. (Although the GOP spin machine has done an excellent job of labeling, that’s a bit of a misnomer because there is no tax on dying for anyone, just an assessment on the assets survivors get in the estates of the really rich.)

One person taking aim has done a not-so-excellent job of research, surprising since his letter clearly states he’s a member of a large Alabama law firm, which has “14 estate planning lawyers who work tirelessly through laws and regulations that seem designed specifically to ensure the government confiscates a large portion of every taxpayer’s estate.”

We’re not talking about the problem that the tax is levied on estates of more than $1.5 million, which hardly covers “every taxpayer.” There’s a certain allowance for political hyperbole.

Rather, it’s the problem that crops up in several places in the letter’s description of Cantwell, such as when the writer suggests the reader “contact Senator Cantwell and ask him to co-sponsor …”

“I have a gender foul-up that’s embarrassing,” admitted Harold Apolinsky of Birmingham. He didn’t do a very good job proofreading the final draft of the letter, which was a form letter being used for other senators. He’s had several folks from Washington calling to point out what he describes as “a stupid mistake.”

Said Cantwell spokeswoman Charla Neuman: “That’s hilarious. I think maybe they should come out to the state and see us, and learn Senator Cantwell’s not a he.”

The office had received about two dozen calls on the topic late last week, about evenly split on the tax, but no mention of any gender confusion. For the record, Cantwell has not signed on to co-sponsor the bill Apolinsky favors, but she does support a permanent repeal of the estate tax on small business and family farm operations.