Position Announcement ö Legislative Assistant
Office of Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien
About the Positions
Councilmember-elect Mike O’Brien is assembling a staff of three full-time legislative assistants to join him when he takes office in January 2010. Mike is seeking smart, passionate individuals who are interested in creating a dynamic, responsive, and effective team.
Legislative assistant responsibilities include: promoting public participation and citizen engagement; identifying and building coalitions in the community; conducting public policy research and analysis; writing issue briefings; coordinating and staffing legislative committees; representing the Councilmember at City, public, and community meetings; partnering with other Councilmembers and their staff; supervising and mentoring interns; and communicating with constituents, the media, and the public at large. Additionally, each legislative assistant will handle a set of administrative tasks such as scheduling, establishing office systems and procedures, and budgeting.
Desired Qualifications
- Commitment to public service, appreciation for vigorous discussion, and willingness to work hard to accomplish meaningful goals
- Degree in public administration, political science, law, urban planning, social work, communications, business, or other relevant field
- Professional experience in policy, legal, economic, or organizational research, community organizing, urban planning, or public relations
- Background or field work in a political environment
- Knowledge of the legislative process
- Effective written and interpersonal communication skills
- Strong research and analytical skills, and the ability to decipher complex issues
- Ability to shape innovative solutions to difficult challenges
- Good organizational skills and attention to detail
- Ability to connect with community members and community organizations
- Ability to adapt and thrive in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment
Application Process
Please submit the following materials, in a single attachment (Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format), to Cory Sbarbaro at OBrienLAjobs@gmail.com :
- Cover letter;
- Resume; and
- References (please include email addresses, and specify the nature of your relationship with each reference).
Review of applications will begin on November 30, 2009. Positions will remain open until filled. We will keep applicants informed as the selection process unfolds.
I voted for you and would appreciate your taking two minutes to read the article below by Timothy Harris that appeared in Real Change newspaper. I’m very concerned about Tim Burgess’s proposed ordinance against the homeless. As Martin Luther King, Jr said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” Thank you.
Tim’s Class War
City councilmember Tim Burgess wants the poor to disappear. It won’t work
Real Change, Sep 30, 2009, Vol: 16, No: 43
I know something about panhandlers. For 15 years, I’ve worked at Real Change, in Belltown. We’re across the street from DSHS, a few doors over from a residential program for low-income mentally ill people, and half a block from a convenience store that does a brisk trade in malt liquor and fortified wine. When I walk down the street, I get asked for change and cigarettes about every hundred yards. Sheer volume dictates that I mostly say no.
There are a few regulars and a rotating cast of familiar types. There are the elderly mentally ill woman who never seems to remember the answer is no, and the whiny guy who smokes about three packs a day of other people’s cigarettes. There are a few sharp operators, with stories of bus trips to Tacoma and cars out of gas, who possess more advanced skills. There are the tweaky junkies, whose eyes shine with sad desperation, and a regular crop of alcoholics who rarely get more than a few blocks from their next bottle.
How many of these are “aggressive?” I can only think of a few minor incidents over the past 15 years. With these, the everyday misery of the street comes with more of an attitude. It’s a little amazing this doesn’t happen more often. For the most part, Seattle’s very poor endure their suffering rather too politely.
Councilmember Tim Burgess will soon introduce legislation to the Seattle City Council to restrict panhandling in Seattle. He says his proposal simply sets a few minimal standards of behavior in the interest of public safety. Not true. Tim Burgess is sucking up to money, pandering to fear and punishing the poor.
Laws that target the visible poor are an increasingly popular municipal strategy for managing the contradictions of radical inequality. They lead to deepened poverty and the expanding incarceration of the very poor. These laws represent an immense failure of political and moral imagination and simply sweep the uncomfortable wreckage of a failed system out of sight. We have to do better.
Life in the Big City
If you want to see what comes of 30-plus years of growing inequality, take a walk downtown in any American city. Great wealth and enormous misery exist in parallel universes that uncomfortably collide.
Over the past three decades, the jobs in manufacturing that were at the core of most urban economies left, leaving cities to either reinvent or die. Seattle is a shining exemplar of the post-globalization urban center. One is either a professional or a service worker, with little opportunity in between.
For those who struggle with addiction, disability, mental illness, and illiteracy even, the lower rungs of the wage ladder are often out of reach. Their numbers are growing, and their survival depends upon the urban-based services that surrounding towns and rural areas are ill-equipped to afford. They are the result of unconscionable system failure, they are here; and they are not going away.
Meanwhile, the downtown has been reinvented as an urban professional’s paradise, filled with shopping, dining and cultural opportunities aimed at attracting conventions, tourists and downtown condo dwellers.
The politics of downtown development in Seattle have always been linked to the harassment and repression of the visibly poor. The Sidran sit-lie ordinances were passed as the capstone to the Rhodes Project, the early ’80s downtown revitalization that gave us Nordstrom and Westlake Center. The construction of Benaroya Hall a few years later came linked to an uncompromising attack by downtown interests on a proposed urban hygiene center less than a block away.
More recently, the recent downtown condo boom brought zero-tolerance policies on urban camping, systematic homeless sweeps and the removal of public toilets. And now, the collapse of the housing market, with its clear threat to the very survival of downtown condo developers, has brought a new round of class warfare dressed up as common sense.
The Burgess proposal, which hasn’t yet been submitted to council and is not yet in writing, bans panhandling near ATMs and cars, at street intersections and freeway onramps and anytime between the hours of dusk and dawn. These “time, place, and manner” restrictions have, unlike more straightforward attempts to ban panhandling, held up well to constitutional appeal.
As the economy has gone into what may be a permanent contraction, the ability of localities to offer the services that the feds won’t has been further eroded. The shrinking human services safety net is being replaced by a prison state for the very poor. One in 99 Americans is now behind bars. One in three African American men live under the supervision of the Department of Corrections. If none of your friends or family have been locked up, odds are you’re not Black or poor.
Do we need more excuses to arrest poor people in Seattle? Tim Burgess thinks the answer is yes.
Milking Fear is Easy. Change is Hard
Recently on KUOW, Burgess described a frightening encounter with a freeway on-ramp panhandler who banged on his car window that very morning in pursuit of a handout. Despite my ample experience with on-ramp panhandling, I’ve never had this happen, and wonder how many of us have.
Panhandlers do, however, make us uncomfortable. Even I, sitting in my car awaiting the on-ramp timing light, will sometimes avoid the gaze of the sign-holding needy. To be made fidgety, however, is different than being threatened. The only threat here is to the well-padded comfort zone of affluent Seattle.
Aggressive panhandling is already against the law. If someone bangs on my car window for a dollar, I’m free to call 911 on my cell phone to report the incident. If the police have nothing better to do, perhaps they’ll eventually respond.
The Burgess plan pre-empts the very possibility that someone might make us uncomfortable. The “broken windows” theory upon which his proposal rests identifies visible public begging as a variety of “social disorder” that leads to a downward spiral of urban decay. Allow panhandlers, the theory goes, and you will soon have AK-47 toting drug dealers ruling the streets in Jeep Grand Cherokees.
These laws, which identify visible poverty as an indicator of social disorder and seek to eliminate potential sources of urban discomfort, pander to fear and deny the collective responsibility we have to one another. They solve nothing and are a victim-blaming, short-term response to wholesale system failure.
The answers, while not easy, are hardly rocket science. Drug decriminalization and increased support for drug and alcohol treatment. Hedges against gentrification and deeper commitment to affordable housing. Economic stimulus spending to create work for the poor. Universal health care and adequate mental health services. Fair taxation to increase the burden of social responsibility upon the rich.
The Burgess proposal to ban panhandling is a mean-spirited attack on the visibly poor, and takes Seattle further down our 20-year path of pandering to the affluent at the expense of the most desperate. This is not a solution to anything. It is the problem.
Will be Mastercard be charged more then once?
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