Podcast appearances and mentions of Chris Vance

This feels like the biggest episode ever! Don't miss these stories! Justin and Eric are joined by our friend and artist Reese Porter @justreese.art to talk about our experiences at Granite State Comic Con for the 40th Anniversary of the TMNT! We are telling some stories of who we met including the artists, writers, Movie and cartoon actors as well as the great fans that we got to finally meet in person. Mentioned in this episode: @Hughrookwoodart the 2024 Granite State Sketch off Champion. Kevin Eastman, Tom Waltz, Kenn Scott, Brian Tochi, Robbie Rist, Judith Hoag, Mike Rooth, Mr Eclectables, Ben Bishop, Mateus Santolouco, Christopher Lefevre, Erik Burnham, Aaron Bartling, Fero Pe, Camillo DiPietrantonio, Corey Smith, Sarah Meyer, Jim & Kathy Lawson, Eric Talbot, KC Wilson, Aaron Hazouri, Ethan Volnugis, Michael Dooney, David Avallone, Steven King, RZP, Chris Vance, Papa Cebo, Randy Macarthur/ Mac's Auction House, The Bishkids, Rob Denner, Benjamin Baldwin, Joey from Ninja Toitles, Jamie Johnson, Freddie Williams II, Jon Sommariva, Gavin Smith, the Escorza Brother, Luis Antonio Delgado and more! We discuss the Turtle sewer lair with Brandon Berry from Feature Presentation @now4yourfeature And we talk to the Geek Gossip Podcast's Artie and Jack about the 40th anniversary Mirage Comics Panel they ran by themselves. @thegeekgossip_podcast We had an interview with the Your Childhood was Trash podcast that the audio did not come out, so we will catch them another time, but also check out the @ycwcast A Pizza Recipe on top of all of that too!

Send us a textJoin us on the Digital Forensics Now podcast as we explore the details of the iOS 18 inactivity reboot issue with mobile forensics expert Christopher Vance from Magnet Forensics. Chris traces the origins of this challenge back to iOS 17 and explains how unified logs play a key role in diagnosing these system memory resets. This episode is packed with valuable insights for anyone interested in the inner workings of iOS devices and the unique considerations they present in digital forensics.We also discuss device security and data preservation, focusing on iOS devices. Examining the balance between law enforcement's need for data access and Apple's privacy measures, we highlight the importance of extracting the data from devices quickly to prevent data loss. Our conversation covers the legal complexities, jurisdictional nuances, and the demand for data preservation tools to address these challenges effectively.We explore recent developments in mobile technology, specifically Android 15's "Private Space" feature and how it will effect the digital forensic community workflow. With insights from industry experts, this episode is full of essential updates tailored for digital forensics professionals looking to stay current.Notes:iOS Devices Rebootinghttps://www.magnetforensics.com/blog/understanding-the-security-impacts-of-ios-18s-inactivity-reboot/5 iOS forensics evidence sources to capture before they expirehttps://www.magnetforensics.com/blog/ios-forensics-evidence-sources-to-capture-before-they-expireMac and iOS Forensic Analysis and Incident Response Posterhttps://www.sans.org/posters/macos-ios-forensic-analysis/

Chris Vance, a Criminalist with the San Diego Sheriff's Department, talks about the work of a Forensic Scientist and the types of jobs the Forensic Chemistry Unit handles; the collaboration with the Medical Examiner's Office; the discoveries of the Marijuana Enforcement Team; and the challenges of the ever-changing seized drug landscape in our region.

In this value-packed episode, Bob Houchin sits down with Chris Vance, a marketing expert and coach at CertainPath, to discuss the key strategies every home service contractor needs to scale their business. Chris dives deep into actionable marketing insights for the HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and roofing trades, covering everything from branding basics to advanced digital marketing tactics. Whether you're a two-truck operation or looking to grow TO A $100MM home services business, Chris shares practical advice on optimizing your marketing budget, leveraging your brand, and staying ahead of the competition. Plus, they explore how to weather the shoulder season and highlight the importance of maintaining customer relationships. Tune in for expert tips and real-world strategies that will take your business to the next level!  Show Notes The Successful Contractor Podcast is a part of the CertainPath family.  CertainPath builds successful home service businesses—and has for 25 years.  We do it by providing contractors with a proven path to success, professional coaching, software solutions, and a member community of 1,100+ strong. Doubling your sales, with a 20% net profit, and an inspiring company culture is ALL possible.  Let us show you the way. With CertainPath, Success is Made Certain. Visit www.mycertainpath.com for more information.   FOLLOW CERTAINPATH: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CertainPath Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/certainpath Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/certainpath/  Thank you to our sponsors: Moen.  As the #1 faucet brand in North America, Moen offers a diverse selection of thoughtfully designed kitchen, bath, and smart water security products, each delivering the best possible combination of meaningful innovation, useful features, and lasting value. Moen strives to be the most durable, reliable, and easy to install brand of faucets. Moen leans on Pros to help continue to drive consumer innovation needs and influence Moen's engagement with consumers in a meaningful way. For More information, visit https://plumber.moen.com/    HD Supply. At HD Supply, our job is helping you do yours. We are uniquely positioned to help drive your business through unrivaled access to professional-grade Plumbing, Electrical and HVAC products and innovative business solutions such as our Stockwise Inventory Management program fully customizable to meet your needs and improve productivity. Our national network of distribution centers and more than 2200 store locations provide national reach with a local focus, providing unmatched convenience and product availability. We Power Pros to Do More.   Staples- Staples is the leading provider in office supplies offering a vast selection of products and services. Over the last 2 years, Staples has also become one of the US largest janitorial suppliers as well. From your everyday business essentials to your office furniture, printing, facilities and breakroom, Staples can do it all. Staples offers benefits to help create efficacies in procurement and consolidate vendors to streamline internal processes. Visit wwww.staplesadvantage.com for learn more.    Amana. Amana® brand is a premium brand from Daikin, the world's #1 indoor comfort solutions company with over 20,000 employees in just North America!   Originating eight decades ago, the Amana brand is synonymous with long-lasting, premium-quality products. Chances are, you and generations before you have enjoyed the dependable performance and longevity that the Amana brand continues to deliver. Today, Amana brand systems, like the new S-Series side discharge system with inverter technology, are manufactured with high-quality materials and innovative technologies. The unique design and excellent energy-efficient performance of the S-Series is a fraction of the size of other Amana brand systems. Because of its slim design, it is easy to transport and install. The Amana brand S-series system is available in AC, heat pump, and dual fuel configurations. Every Amana brand indoor comfort product is built to our highest standards. The S-series is no different. Take comfort with its 10-year parts and Lifetime Unit Replacement limited warranties*. For more information on the Amana S-Series, “Follow” the Amana brand on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.   Shubee- ShuBee makes it easy to take your customer service to the next level. Show your clients you care with their full line of extra-large, extra durable products made specifically to protect their home or business. ShuBee products were made by service professionals for service professionals. None of those cheap, thin shoe covers that tear on the job. Their booties are made tough. They have surface protection products for every floor type to make sure you don't leave behind scuffs or scrapes. And don't forget their coveralls. Made with an extra long torso for ease of motion, while keeping your uniform clean all day. Let ShuBee prevent the hassle of clean up by preventing the mess in the first place. Put your best foot forward with ShuBee today. Visit their website at www.shubee.com or give them a call today and mention coupon code CPPOD10 to receive 10% off your next order.  

Democrats are fired up for Kamala Harris this week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Also in attendance: some Republican leaders who are rallying votes for her. Chris Vance is among that group. He's the former chair of the Washington State Republican Party and today he tells us why he joined “Republicans for Harris.”  We can only make Seattle Now because listeners support us. You have the power! Make the show happen by making a gift to KUOW: https://www.kuow.org/donate/seattlenowAnd we want to hear from you! Follow us on Instagram at SeattleNowPod, or leave us feedback online: https://www.kuow.org/feedback See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What’s Trending: AG Ferguson hid two lawsuits from the public -- and the sponsors of the initiatives who were impacted. Will Chris Vance please go away? // The mainstream media continues to defend the fact that Kamala Harris won’t talk to the media. Microsoft says that Iran is attempting to interfere in the presidential election. The Iranians also hacked into the Trump campaign. // Seattle police have arrested a man that was throwing debris onto I-5. The suspect may have been homeless.  

What’s Trending: Mayor Bruce Harrell says that City of Seattle and King County workers will return to in-person this fall. The Trump campaign has already released an attack ad against Tim Walz and Kamala Harris. JD Vance called out the media for not questioning Harris and her for “hiding” from them. Chris Vance joins Republicans for Harris, even though he’s not a republican. //  LongForm: GUEST: Former King County Sheriff John Urqhart claims we shouldn’t have a gang unit. Rantz strongly disagrees. //  The Quick Hit: Josh Shapiro snub was about appeasing antisemitic Progressives

GUEST: Former WA State GOP Chair Chris Vance, on primaries and Republicans For Harris // Is there anywhere you can’t wear a baseball cap? // SCENARIOS!

This is an excerpt from the full episode "The Fall of the Republican Party: With Chris Vance."Michael Steele speaks with former Washington State Party Chairman, Chris Vance about his new book, "The Fall of the Shining City: What Happened to the Republican Party. Why it Happened. And What Must Happen Now to Save American Democracy.” The pair discuss third parties and creating a new faction of the GOP, whether or not the GOP will return to being a party of Reagan and where the party goes moving forward.Check out "The Fall of the Shining City" here: https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Shining-City-Republican-Happened/dp/B0CW2LVM1CIf you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to leave a review or share it with a friend!Follow Chris Vance @ChrisVance123Follow Michael @MichaelSteeleFollow the podcast @steele_podcast     

Michael Steele speaks with former Washington State Party Chairman, Chris Vance about his new book, "The Fall of the Shining City: What Happened to the Republican Party. Why it Happened. And What Must Happen Now to Save American Democracy.” The pair discuss third parties and creating a new faction of the GOP, whether or not the GOP will return to being a party of Reagan and where the party goes moving forward.Check out "The Fall of the Shining City" here: https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Shining-City-Republican-Happened/dp/B0CW2LVM1CIf you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to leave a review or share it with a friend!Follow Chris Vance @ChrisVance123Follow Michael @MichaelSteeleFollow the podcast @steele_podcast   

In this episode, the boys talk with a former Neversoft developer, Chris Vance, who is most well known for authoring the Through The Fire and Flames chart in Guitar Hero 3.

This episode is off to a smashing start as Anthony fills Alex in on the fate of his Mother's good china. Anthony's TIPSY about "WE ARE WHAT WE CONSUME" (not just food based) and Alex's Yaiyai-ism about the direction of your tooth brush. Today's guest is Chris Vance, Creative Initiatives Manager for Sycuan San Diego Casino Resort , They touch on his creative projects at the resort like the San Diego Padres-themed guest suite, the Tribe's philanthropic Right to Dream Soccer Camp initiative and even the new "Sycuan Pride" Weekend the first week of June. They also touch base on Chris's uber-successful extracurricular nightlife brand "Bear Night San Diego" and he has kept the dance floor full over 16 years through venue challenges, rain and the pandemic. Enjoy.Follow @bollottaentertainment on InstagramSubmit ASK ANTHONY questions on the form at www.bollotta.com/podcast

At the height of the COVID crisis, state governments around the world forbade churches from gathering on the Lord's Day and restricted pastors and loved ones from visiting the sick in the hospital. The lockdown policies were particularly severe in New Zealand, which compelled a number of committed pastors and Christians there to push back and form the group, Free to Be Church. In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm interview New Zealand pastors Chris Vance and André Bay, discussing lessons learned during this trying time. The first and foremost lesson is that Christ, not the state, is the exclusive head of the church, and His mandate for local churches to gather must be followed. Churches must worship and fellowship as God directs, not invent pragmatic online alternatives. And, finally, true love for our neighbor comes through obedience to Christ, not by seeking the favor of our community or civil leaders.

On this week-in-review, Crystal is joined by metro news columnist and opinion editor for The News Tribune in Tacoma, Matt Driscoll! They discuss numerous counties suing Washington state over behavioral health failures, the importance of a raise for Tacoma City Council and other public servants, Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward's shady association with Christian nationalist Matt Shea, devastating wildfires and smoke across Washington, and the backstory of Pierce County Village and a recent veto override. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Matt Driscoll, at @mattsdriscoll.   Resources “Most of Washington's counties are suing the state for refusing to provide necessary behavioral health treatment under state law” by Andrew Villeneuve from The Cascadia Advocate   “More than half of WA counties have filed suit against the state for behavioral health failures” by Shauna Sowersby from The News Tribune   “Tacoma City Council is getting a big raise. Think they don't deserve it? Think again” by Matt Driscoll for The News Tribune   “Spokane mayor says she didn't know Matt Shea would be at Christian nationalist concert headlined by Matt Shea's Christian nationalist buddy” by Nate Sanford from Inlander   “Destructive fires swept through Spokane County last weekend, killing two and leaving hundreds without homes” by Samantha Wohlfeil and Nate Sanford from Inlander   “How behind-the-scenes politics helped win approval for Pierce County homeless village” by Shea Johnson from The News Tribune   “In rare move, Pierce County Council overrides executive veto on homeless village zoning” by Becca Most from The News Tribune   Find stories that Crystal is reading here   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Tuesday topical show and our Friday week-in-review delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today, we are continuing our Friday week-in-review shows where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: metro news columnist and opinion editor for The News Tribune in Tacoma, Matt Driscoll. Hey! [00:01:08] Matt Driscoll: Hello - thanks for having me once again - it's always a pleasure. [00:01:11] Crystal Fincher: Thanks for coming back. We love our super informative and inside look into Pierce County whenever you're on - always a pleasure. I wanna start off talking about something that a lot of counties got together to do this week - and that is sue the state of Washington. Why are they suing and what's happening here? [00:01:32] Matt Driscoll: It's part of a long-running failure in our state mental health system involving folks who enter the criminal justice system and then get referred, one way or the other, to either competency evaluations or to stand trial, then flipped over to a system of civil commitments. This lawsuit involves 22 counties coming together to sue the state, claiming that the state - at facilities like Western State Hospital - is failing to provide the services to folks who do flip into that civil commitment area. And recently DSHS, Western State has been refusing a lot of those patients because they say they've been working to make room for folks who fall under the Trueblood settlement, which was the State Supreme Court ruling that basically - found that the state has an obligation and needs to do more to provide the competency evaluations and those sorts of things and potential restorative services to make someone able to stand trial. So it all involves folks who enter into the criminal justice system, then get referred to behavioral health, mental health stuff, and basically just the state's long-running failure to be able to provide the kinds of services and beds that those folks need and they deserve. It's all very complicated. It's just another indication of the state's continued failure to provide those services and beds. We've been talking about this for a very long time. It's very clear that it's still a total failure on the state's part, at least in my opinion. [00:03:01] Crystal Fincher: As you said, we've been talking about failures in this system for years - have heard some shocking and horrifying stories over the years. This is an issue that has been one of the biggest dogging Governor Inslee's administration during this term. And not to say he's absolutely the cause of all of these problems - I'm sure some of them were definitely inherited, there's a lot of challenges within this system. And as they point out, there have been recent investments to try and deliver on that settlement in the Trueblood decision, to try and turn the corner and get out of this crisis. One of the challenges here that they brought up is that there seems to be a conflict in that Trueblood decision - something that essentially is breaking this current system. As the Governor's office pointed out in their response, the Trueblood decision actually prevents them from taking new civil commitment clients. And that's one of the things that the counties are saying - Hey, they shouldn't be doing. So this almost seems like partly a corrective measure or seeking order to say - There's a conflict here - this order is essentially grinding this system to a halt. Once again, we're trying to fix it - we need some order. Do you know if there's some other entity that can take these civil commitments? [00:04:15] Matt Driscoll: Just to be 100% clear on this, I am by no means an expert on the intricacies of the state's behavioral health system - it's supposed to work and it's not working. That being said, it's another one of these massive gaps that we see so often in our system. You're right about the horror stories, going back to the Trueblood decision - you still hear, to this day, stories about folks who end up in jails for long periods of time, even before they've stood trial, waiting to have services available at somewhere like Western State where they can even get a competency evaluation. Think about the human rights aspects of that - of people being warehoused in jails, awaiting these court-mandated evaluations - that's the problem that Trueblood's intending to fix. On the same token, we've clearly got all these folks who shouldn't be in the criminal justice system. As the governor pointed out and others pointed out - in defense of the state, if you will - the referrals for these civil commitments are way up in recent years. I forget the statistics off the top of my head, but I think it might be like 40%, so we're seeing more and more of these folks being flipped out of the criminal justice system intended to send to the civil commitment system. It's just not working and there's a huge gap. And we can talk about how complicated it all is, and the way it gets siloed, and all the ways it's supposed to work, and the way it's not working - we have a wholly inadequate behavioral health system in our state. Decades and decades of underfunding - we've never acknowledged, we've done some piecemeal stuff. I certainly give the state and the Inslee administration credit for recent investments, but the bottom line is that this is piecemeal drops in the buckets trying to patch up a system that is just wholly unprepared to meet the demands of today. And people are suffering because of it. [00:05:54] Crystal Fincher: People are suffering, their civil rights are being violated, and some of these are resulting in horrific abuses in these overworked, sometimes unaccountable systems. This is happening against a backdrop of several employees within DSHS calling for the head of DSHS to resign. How does this even get untangled? It's time for major, systemic, urgent action beyond what we've done - clearly, what is already happening is not enough. [00:06:25] Matt Driscoll: One thing that the counties point out in the lawsuit is because these civil commitments are not being accepted or in some cases being discharged, you've got public safety issues. You have folks who the system has determined would be best served by ongoing treatment and civil commitments essentially being released. And that's, again - wherever you fall on the debates of how the state should be handling the interaction of criminal justice and behavioral health, it's just a bad scene all around. As a state with as many resources as Washington, we should be ashamed - similar to our public education system. A left-leaning state with progressive lawmakers and clear Democratic majorities - the fact that we are so clearly failing on this stuff is a black eye and again, people are suffering because of it. [00:07:10] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I also wanna talk about a recent decision from a commission in Tacoma that's going to take effect soon to increase the salaries, by a pretty significant amount, of the Tacoma City Council. And you wrote a column about this this week, which I thought was very timely and appropriate and a conversation that a lot of cities are having and more will continue to. And that's - these raises are absolutely justified and should go further when we look at the scope of responsibility involved in these positions. What did you talk about in your column? [00:07:46] Matt Driscoll: This has been an issue for me for a long time, as someone who's followed City Council government in Tacoma. At the root of the problem, it's that historically - City Council in Tacoma, third largest city in the state - it's considered a part-time job, it's paid as such. The reality of it is that anyone who served in that position knows it's not a part-time job, it's a full-time job. When I started at The News Tribune, councilmembers were making $40,000. Considering the challenges that Tacoma faces, I think there's lots of room for critique. People can see these raises and think about job performance - Do these guys deserve raises? But that's not really what it's about, right? It's about our system of government and who has the ability to run for office and serve under kind of the framework we have set up. We have historically considered this a part-time, low-paying position. If you're an average person in Tacoma with a family or financial responsibilities, the idea of signing up for what you're paid for as a part-time job that's clearly gonna be a full-time job and still trying to meet any of that - it becomes impossible. It severely limits the pool of candidates that are available. [00:08:56] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely - several perspectives are left out. Beyond that, we're asking them to do such an important job. The things we talk about every week on this show - from public safety to economic development to land use policy and educational decisions - every thing that touches your life, we're asking them to do. It's wild to me that in the same society, we will justify $100 million salaries of CEOs of companies, yet cities and organizations with comparable budgets we're asking to settle for $30,000, $50,000. When we look at how important the job is and the expertise and commitment that it really does require, there's no getting around the fact that this is definitely a full-time job, especially - when it's done right, it's beyond a full-time job. I think most people can agree, no matter what your political affiliation, that it's not. We also are talking about shortages in several of these sectors too, so we need to pay people more for the work that's being done if we wanna expect better results. [00:10:00] Matt Driscoll: And it's like, regardless of what you think about the current council's job performance, what do you want your City Council person to be? Do you want it to be someone who is dedicating 20 hours a week to it and juggling a bunch of other stuff, or do you want somebody who's able to attack it like a full-time job and dedicates the time and energy it takes - both to be responsive to citizen concerns and do the homework that it takes to make good policy decisions? This isn't to call out any particular City councilmembers over the years, but I think if you've closely observed City Council here in Tacoma, you can see folks are learning these issues as they go and they're asking these questions, and a lot of times you'll be - Oh my God, that's a pretty obvious question. Do you want someone who has the time to dedicate to the job? And even more than that, do you want to make this a job feasible for some people to take on, or do you want to make this a job that only a few fairly privileged, essentially wealthy or better off folks can take on? For most people, the question is the latter. I think historically the idea of making Tacoma City, or a city council, and even the State Legislature part-time is that it would allow average people to serve in democracy - that's one of the ideals there. But in practice, I think what it really does, particularly these days, is it severely limits the type of people who are able to feasibly serve in office. You see that in some of the races that we've got going this year in Tacoma, particularly on the Jamika Scott District 3 race, where she's a local community activist and artist. She's more of an average person - she doesn't have a bunch of money, she's not the executive director at some nonprofit. For an average person to make the commitment to run for office and find the time to doorbell, it's a huge commitment - full-time plus work for part-time pay. [00:11:50] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely - completely agree. I want to talk about another city - the City of Spokane and the activities of its mayor. The mayor and Christian nationalist extremist, former State Representative Matt Shea, attended a TPUSA event where they were just talking about a bunch of extreme, out-of-touch things while the ashes of neighborhoods were still smoldering nearby. What happened here? What is the reaction? [00:12:23] Matt Driscoll: Mayor of Spokane, Mayor Woodward, appeared at an event - Matt Shea was involved, Christian nationalist organization. She was apparently invited on stage for prayer, and Shea was there and prayed for her. And of course then all hell broke loose because of Shea's background and the backgrounds of some of the other folks involved. Of course, the mayor immediately said - Didn't know Shea was going to be there, wasn't my intention, I'm disgusted by all his views. It turns out maybe she'd been to events with Matt Shea in the past - I think a lot of people really didn't buy that excuse. But the bigger thing here, really, is yet another instance that illustrates the complexity and tension in the Republican Party. Lawmakers on the right who are "the good ones" or "the saner ones" - and there are a lot of Republicans, on the whole - in Pierce County in particular, Bruce Dammeier, JT Wilcox, leaders that I disagree with fundamentally. This tension between trying to be one of those not-extremist conservatives, but then the votes relies to some extent to courting the more extreme elements of the party. What ends up happening is these leaders awkwardly, unsuccessfully try to find this middle ground where they can not alienate the extreme elements of the party while not appearing extreme themselves, or maybe not even being "extreme" themselves. But it just never works and it ends up looking dumb. And this is just another example of that where they try to have it both ways - they try to disavow the extreme elements of the party, but then they still rely on extreme elements of the party for the support they need to win elections and serve in office. I certainly have no sympathy for the mayor of Spokane. It was very predictable that this would happen. If you find yourself at white nationalist organized events or religious extremist organized events, it's very easy to not get on stage or not do that. She signed up for it. She got what she deserved. I don't think it's probably the last time we'll see something like this either. [00:14:20] Crystal Fincher: I don't even view the situation as there being extreme elements within the party - that is the party, that is the base, that is now the mainstream of the party. It's beyond local party activists - these are their leaders. There is a nostalgia that I see, especially from national political pundits, wanting to still give credit to those moderates - those moderates are enabling the extremism. They are enabling this extremism that in public they try and distance themselves from. Even though she tried to say - Oh, I had no idea, she's been to an event just like this before. Even if she had no idea Matt Shea was there before, which no one buys, she got up there, saw him there and gave him a hug, and allowed him to lay hands on her and pray. Heard right before - them talk about the "problem with homosexuality" - obviously there is no problem with homosexuality, that's an extreme belief. That is the party - several electeds within the party, donors within the party, the people making decisions about the platform on the party. I made the bad decision of watching that Republican debate. I saw a lot of people going - Oh, these are extreme beliefs. They're not targeting the average American anymore - they're really fine with disenfranchising the average American. They are speaking to that base that's going to elevate people like this to these elected positions and hope for treatment as moderates in the media. This is an opportunity in Spokane to once again point out that these are extreme beliefs. These are beliefs that our Supreme Court has rejected, our State Supreme Court has rejected - and that we don't want. Clearly she knows that. She wasn't really sad about it happening, or else she wouldn't have appeared with him before and been chummy. They want to be able to do this behind closed doors. And lots of people will cite JT Wilcox, who I know lots of people have good relationships with - people like that need to contend with who the party is today. You're affixing your name to that label? - you can be what you are without that label. If you are attaching that label and participating in that, this is what you are enabling. [00:16:24] Matt Driscoll: Where do the folks like the JT Wilcoxes or the Bruce Dammeiers go within this party, right? If they are the moderates they claim to be, the Republican Party depends on that support. If they try to find that middle ground, then it ends up working out like this. Again, I don't have any sympathy for it. I wrote a column in the Trump years and I've just halfway defended folks like JT Wilcox and Bruce Dammeier about why they hadn't condemned Trump. What JT Wilcox will tell you - I'm a local guy and I stay out of national politics. And that's fine, I have a lot of respect for JT as an individual. But can you see what's going on? And do you have the backbone to stand up and say - This is wrong, this is not what I represent - even if it means that you might get voted out, or that you might not be in office, or that you might make your life more difficult. What we see most of the time is elected officials, politicians - they're not willing to do that. They're not willing to disavow or distance themselves from this stuff because they don't want to risk their jobs as an elected official or their powers - and maybe some of them genuinely do it out of the hope that if they just stick it out long enough, they'll be able to course correct on that party. That's a flawed idea. Whether you agree with Chris Vance or not, the way he describes it is pretty accurate at this point - it's the base of the party and folks need to make their decisions on whether that's the party they agree with. What we see, more times than not, is folks trying to have their cake and eat it too. [00:17:56] Crystal Fincher: Chris Vance made the decision to not affiliate with that label - if that's who's standing beside him, then he needs to move to a different place. On both the Republican and Democratic side, that affiliation with the party comes with tremendous resources - an absolute resource advantage over someone who is running as an Independent or with a minor party - everything from voter file access, which is useful, important information about voters from public sources and from private commercial sources, information like that is very helpful to a campaign. Things like donations and structure and endorsements and volunteers - those kinds of things are often built-in to the support of a party. It is a challenge to run outside of a major party. There were some character-defining moments for a lot of these people - maybe if they would have seen this rising extremism take over the mainstream of the party, maybe we don't find ourselves here. That attachment to power also can be corrosive - if you see something that is turning your stomach, it's not okay to stay silent, no matter which party you're a part of. [00:19:03] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, this continues to be a character-defining moment. These leaders still have the opportunity - they can still come out and say - This is wrong. And continually they don't. I don't really expect that to change. The opportunity still is there for them to take a stand. They don't, because if you alienate the base of the party, you're gonna be out of luck. And Chris Vance, for all his wisdom, is out of luck. He ran for office a couple cycles ago, and he lost badly - can't be a moderate conservative without the support of the Republican Party and if you alienate the Trump support, you're out of luck. [00:19:40] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, part of what made this so scandalous in the first place and so offensive to people is that this was happening amidst really destructive fires that swept through Spokane County last weekend. We see the 20,000 acres at that time up in flames, 265 structures destroyed, including a ton of homes, two people killed that we know of, lots of people not knowing what to do. Spokane City Councilmember Zack Zappone showed a picture of the street where his parents live - all of the houses were burnt down - his parents lost their home, his uncle lost his home. Just feel for everybody involved in that situation - I can't even imagine - it's just so totally devastating. [00:20:21] Matt Driscoll: On the human level, on the individual level - that loss, the death toll is staggering - just a lot of thoughts for everyone going through that. For a long time in my life, we talked about climate change and we talked about the problem it presented. It was academic, right? We saw the video of the polar bear with nowhere to go. When I started at The News Tribune, there wasn't really a summer smoke season. And now it's late August - it's the smoke season - it's a reality of life now. And then I think about my kids - I got a 16-year-old daughter, a 12-year-old son, 8-year-old daughter. It's really heavy to think about the impacts that we've seen from climate change and the way it's escalated. History is so long - a lot of times it's difficult to track the change, right? - it feels long. But with this devastation that we've seen that's tied to climate change in recent years and that trend - it's just really depressing - in Western Washington now, and this will probably be our reality moving forward. It's heartbreaking. [00:21:24] Crystal Fincher: This has not been normal for me my entire life. The warnings from climate scientists - we did not heed them for decades, and here we are - it's scary. The reality is this is as good as it's going to be for a while. This is actually going to get much worse. It's up to us and what we decide to do now - it's gonna get worse before it gets better. Are we gonna choose to make it better or not? This is a tangent - I'm on an age divide - you look at polling, and I'm right there on the divide where opinion splits. I talk to people on the older side of that divide who are more complacent, who don't necessarily feel the urgency. And then those on the younger side - and it's 15, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, especially working in politics - you see things like slogans, "fighting for our lives, fighting for our futures," and those are slogans to some people. What does it look like when you are literally fighting for your life? What does it look like when you don't want to see this kind of destruction happening everywhere? We're not even talking about the hurricane in Southern California and Nevada - this is all wild, and we're seeing increasingly wild things across the globe. This is only going to accelerate. It's decisions like whether to build a new freeway or not. It's decisions like whether to invest in and build out pipelines for gas and coal. At every level of government, at every level of power - decisions are being made every day - we can't afford for more hurt right now. We're seeing activism, we're seeing direct action. These stakes are high, and I just wish more people understood and felt that. It's just really hard right now. There are a lot of different interests. These are the consequences. [00:23:00] Matt Driscoll: There is one thing that gives me any glimmer and hope in this - is the younger generation. The stakes are exactly as you described for them. I think of my kids and the world that we've left them - the idea that this is baseline. How much worse do you want it to get? I'm not going to chalk this up to human nature, but you mentioned complacency. It's a little crazy how easy people grow accustomed to something like smoke season now. Are we cool with just getting used to this? Are we all right with that? It feels like a lot of people are. Maybe it's just my nature, but I have a lot of empathy for people in general, 'cause it's hard, man. It's hard out there being a person. It's hard to support yourself. We haven't made it any easier in the United States. There's a lot that just goes into surviving. Asking people to think above and beyond that, it's a big ask - and it's also unfair. We lay a lot of this climate change stuff, this environmental stuff on the individual - like you shouldn't be watering your grass, or you should buy an electric car. Those things are good, but it almost gives the real culprit - the governments and the fossil fuel companies - a pass. We end up guilt tripping each other - How long was your shower and stuff? If we really want to do something about this, it's gonna take exactly what you talked about - reimagining transportation, not building freeways, being willing to say - Yeah, traffic's bad right now, we're not gonna build another freeway, we gotta figure this out a different way. Or we have the capacity for a new airport, but air travel's terrible and it's one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gases - we're gonna figure something else out, and it's probably gonna be difficult in the interim, but we just don't have a choice. We never want to make that choice. We always want to push it down the road a little bit, make a little bit of improvements. This incremental change - the incremental change is not going fast enough. It's gonna take drastic measures. It's gonna take major changes to the way our life. It's gonna take just major restructuring of the way we do things. We still get to make the choice. It's just that one of those options results in stuff like we're seeing now. [00:25:09] Crystal Fincher: The final thing I want to talk about today has been the topic of discussion in Pierce County for quite some time, a hot topic on the Pierce County Council - and they've gone back and forth. It's this Pierce County Village, which is the county trying to solve one of the problems, one of the crises that it's dealing with - homelessness - and looking at building a, what is it, 265-unit building to house and service people who've been experiencing homelessness and try and get them on a path to housing stability. But oh, it is not simple, and there have been some twists and turns. What is this and what has been happening? [00:25:50] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, it's a very Pierce County story - I really love it for that, 'cause it is very complicated. What the county wants to do - and by the county, I mean the County Executive Bruce Dammeier and his administration - is permanent supportive housing. It's housing designed for chronically homeless individuals. It's not like an apartment building-type situation - it's actually individual homes in a community. The County Executive's office became enamored with this model - it has had some success, from what I understand, in Texas - and they wanted to bring it back to Pierce County. This was a number of years ago. They started the process of potentially looking for a location for it, which proved really difficult because it's a major project. They eventually settled on a piece of land out in the Spanaway area - it's got some wetlands, it's got some concerns around it. They ended up choosing a provider to run it - Tacoma Rescue Mission. What they want to do is use about $21, $22 million in federal COVID money to build this site and then let Tacoma Rescue Mission run it. To make it feasible, they changed some zoning. Broadly, it's an idea that has widespread support. It's something that the Democrats, liberals have supported for a long time. I support it, I think it's a good idea. Providing permanent supportive housing, 200-some-odd units of it, it's a good idea. But the details of it have become very tricky. There's some questions about - was the Rescue Mission kind of baked in as a provider even before they saw it for applicants? Are they pushing too hard on this specific piece of land? There's challenges now to the zoning changes. It is very complicated. It's moving forward, but it's got some significant hurdles to clear. The most recent development is the County Council changed the zoning to make it possible - that was challenged by a couple of places, and that's where things stand. [00:27:34] Crystal Fincher: I just want to point out for those who are not familiar with Pierce County politics, Pierce County Council - the Pierce County Executive is a Republican. And what's the split on the Council now between Republican and Democrat? [00:27:46] Matt Driscoll: It's a slight Democrat majority - I believe it's 4-3. The only reason I hesitate is because Tacoma has nine, Pierce County has seven - I always have to do the math - it's 4-3, 4-3 leaning Dems. [00:27:56] Crystal Fincher: I always get confused with the numbers. You look at a city like Burien and the mess that they're going through with their majority on their council - this is a different kind of situation. Sometimes where you have a Republican executive saying - Hey, we think this can work, there's a model somewhere, let's go learn about it - actually engaging in trying to have a solution, the conversation is starting with action, and what are we going to do? There was a piece this week in The News Tribune going through public records - looking at this model, one of the controversies starting out was that this trip was taken with the Tacoma Rescue Mission and went on this learning, fact-finding mission to see what Austin's doing up close, to see if it's something that could be feasible here. And the contract to do this that was competitively bid ended up going to the same person, which made - the same organization involving this person - making some people go - Wait a minute. Was the fix in on this contract? - especially looking at some of the scoring of the bidding. That seems like maybe it was cooked a little bit in favor of this, but then you have other people saying - This is a pretty normal way that something like this progresses. How did you see this? [00:29:09] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, Pierce County is a big county, but just small-town style - I love this stuff, there is so much depth to it. At the center of this, you have the county, which has access to $21, $22 million in federal funds to do something about homelessness. The county executive wants to give that to Tacoma Rescue Mission, which as you point out, won a competitive bid to build this facility. The idea is that through philanthropic fundraising and just what the Rescue Mission does, they'll be able to fund it moving forward. What makes it slightly different is you've got a Republican county executive saying - We have to do something to serve this population, to house this population, and the answer is permanent supportive housing - which is a little outside the box for conservatives. The County Executive's Office believes that, with this one-time investment, the government can step back. Then you get into questions of Duke Paulson from the Rescue Mission going on these trips even before the bids start being taken - lo and behold, the Rescue Mission wins the bid, LIHI was the other bidder. There was a competitive bid process - they did go through steps, but naturally it raises questions of - Was that kind of procedural? Was that legitimate? When it all comes out in the wash, it's a very Pierce County thing - there's reason for concern of - was this the outcome everyone wanted from the beginning? You can make the answer that - yeah, yeah, clearly it was. I think they went down there, they got this idea in mind, they thought the Rescue Mission would be a good place to run it, and that's where they ran with. On the other end of the spectrum there, I think it's important to keep in mind that the Rescue Mission has a long history of serving homelessness in Pierce County. Regardless of what you believe about the religious aspects of Rescue Mission does, they're a well-respected organization in Pierce County when it comes to serving the homeless. Pierce County is a small place. Should we not expect the County Executive's Office to have a close working relationship with one of the primary providers of homelessness in Pierce County? It raises a lot of questions about backroom deals. It's important to keep in mind at the end of the day, they are trying to do something good. I think it's good that we're asking these questions. It's good that we have this coverage. My colleague, Shea Johnson, just delivered a big package on this this week - it's really well done, folks should read it. It's small-town politics and they're trying to do something good, but there are a lot of questions along the way. [00:31:21] Crystal Fincher: Including questions about the site that has been determined for this. Siting is always a major issue, especially when it comes to siting things that are going to serve the homeless. People have a lot of feelings about this - some don't want it to happen at all, but a site was chosen. This site that was chosen - in the Spanaway area - there may be some environmental concerns. Sometimes things look very black and white from a simple explanation, but it is not infrequent in these situations where you have multiple issues, multiple interests, multiple people who ultimately want good things having different perspectives and having issues impact these groups and these stakeholders in different ways. Is it okay to move forward on a site? We just talked about having to take urgent action to mitigate climate change, to not - continuous sprawl, destroying local ecosystems - that seems to be the major issue in first passing this and then the repeal of the passage over the veto of the Pierce County Executive of the zoning for the site. They could still move forward, but wouldn't have future flexibility attached to this use without another change. [00:32:36] Matt Driscoll: You're right. The Rescue Mission has cleared certain hurdles at this point - the reversal of the zoning change wouldn't affect them - they're vested, they can move forward provided they continue to check the boxes in terms of all the sorts of things they'd have to do to make it happen. The ways that this is potentially getting derailed has a lot to do with politics. At the center of what we have going on here is a dispute on the Growth Management Act. And one of the reasons that this was interesting from the beginning is you had a Republican county executive proposing a major facility to serve the chronically unhoused - the most difficult population to serve. He wanted to put that in rural Pierce County. Normally what happens with something like that is it gets smack dab in the middle of Tacoma, right? Because none of these outlying, more conservative areas want anything to do with that. So the very fact that he was willing to acknowledge that it would be advantageous to put a facility like this somewhere in the more rural parts of the county where - assuming his base is out there - that took some guts and there's been a lot of pushback on that. But you also see attention here where the county executive is saying - Look, in order to build the type of housing we need to serve the unhoused, we need to build facilities like this in areas that are potentially sensitive. That's a broad description, but I think that's what it comes down to. The zoning was challenged and the County Council is getting advice that there might be something to those challenges, particularly the second one has them a little bit worried. They went back and changed the zoning to get out of trouble, to quash those challenges. You have a much broader debate about land use and sprawl and what we should build where, and you've got familiar conservative talking points of - like we need to make it easier for people to build wherever they want. Then you've got kind of Democrats on the Council saying - You know, zoning matters, we have to protect these areas, we have to limit sprawl. But does that then mean that all the stuff that we build ends up being dense, transit-oriented? One of the elements that the county executive's office would say is appealing about this model is because it is more individual homes, it's not a warehousing situation, it's a community. This tension over growth management and how much flexibility should we create to allow this to be built in areas that are designated as sensitive or more rural - I don't know. [00:35:01] Crystal Fincher: You're doing a fantastic job explaining it. This is a complex issue that takes some time to talk through. One of the reasons why I do this show is so we can talk through it and really come to an understanding. I really appreciated that package in The News Tribune this week that gave really helpful background and context to what's happening. The final element is that the viability and success of this relies on private fundraising - it does seem there's some money out there. The flags raised with this repeal of zoning is that this may make fundraising for this property more complicated, more challenging - seeing as that there may not be the flexibility moving forward, or the seeming collaboration, or green light that some people may have previously thought was there. Who knows what's gonna happen? Do you see this likely being built? What do you see moving forward? [00:35:55] Matt Driscoll: I'm not exactly sure how much of that I buy from Tacoma Rescue Mission and its supporters - I've got a lot of respect for that agency - I know Duke well. What we're seeing here is they're trying to maintain as much flexibility as possible to move forward from a development standpoint, as advantageous to what they wanna do in the future. The bottom line is they could build what they propose to build, provided they clear the necessary hurdles as it speaks. So I don't know how sympathetic I am to the idea that they need additional flexibility to build even more on sensitive areas or whatever - or we need to change the zoning across the whole county to make this thing possible - but I could be wrong on that. But in terms of its overall prospects, one other thing I would note that makes this interesting is because there is another political element in this question about funding. The Democrats on the Council, to their credit, support such an idea. They really leveraged the County Executive and Republicans' desire to build this thing into passing a behavioral health sales tax, which could potentially go to fund something like this, or something much like this, down the road. That's another element of that - the support for this village ultimately hinged on Republicans being willing to support them and passing that - they needed a super majority. So that's another interesting wrinkle on this. And one of the reasons I love this issue - because it's just so Pierce County - it's politics and power and relationships, but I think everyone is trying to do a good thing. We're trying to build permanent supportive housing. We're trying to protect sensitive areas and limit sprawl. So your broader question - Will this thing get built? I have no idea. When it initially went through, I probably would have put it at maybe 70/30. The package that Shea Johnson put together really illustrates the desire and the support to get this thing together. It has bipartisan support. Everybody wants to build 200-some odd units of permanent supportive housing. There's the desire locally to do it. I do think that politics in Pierce County requires Democrats and Republicans to work together to do things. There's not a potential here in Pierce County for Democrats to just do everything the way they want to do it - that's not gonna happen - you're gonna have to work together in some regard. And here you have an opportunity to work together to build what could be a really important project for the area. [00:38:09] Crystal Fincher: Makes sense to me. Well, we will continue to follow that - certainly a lot to follow and a lot left to see as it develops. And with that, we thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on this Friday, August 25th, 2023. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is the incredible Shannon Cheng. Our insightful co-host today is metro news columnist and opinion editor for The News Tribune in Tacoma, Matt Driscoll - always great insight and information from Matt. [00:38:38] Matt Driscoll: It was wonderful to be here once again - like I think I said last time - I always enjoy the opportunity to come on here and play exotic Pierce County man for the listeners up north. Again, I feel like I - there's so much to get into with the homeless village and I appreciate your time, your willingness to dedicate some time to it and talk about it. I would just recommend folks read the package 'cause I don't really feel like I did it justice - it's very complicated, it's been going on for a long time, but it's really important for this neck of the woods. So thanks for having me on. [00:39:04] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. And we will link that in the resources in the show notes and online. You can find Matt on Twitter @mattsdriscoll. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can find me on all of the platforms @finchfrii, that's two I's at the end. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get the podcast - to get the Friday week-in-review shows and our Tuesday topical show - delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, please leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - we'll talk to you next time.

Chris Vance from Bear Night San Diego is on the pod this week! Hear from the Southern boy all about Bear Night's beginnings, middles and future San Diego Pride plans for the quintessential SoCal bear event. Chris has some surprising answers for the 10 Self-Indulgent Q's and then they get into season 6 premier of BlackMirror (NETFLIX), the sugar highs and Kandy lows of Drag Race ALL STARS 8 (Paramount+) and Dangilo now has the WE Tv app because of Chris's influence...All that and their Person, Place & Thing of the week.Get your tickets and Info for Chris's Upcoming San Diego Bear Events including presale for FURRAGEOUS (July 15) https://www.eventbrite.com/o/bearnightsd-14274276357Get your Tickets for SUPER SUCIA SUNDAY (July 16 San Diego Pride Weekend at the Rail)https://supersuciasdpride.rsvpify.com/Connect with Bear Night San Diego @bearnightsd on InstagramConnect with Chris Vance @chrisvancetoo on InstagramConnect with Dangilo https://linktr.ee/baldandbingeable

Artist and Baltimore native Chris Vance joins us. Coming from his appearance in the Draw Off at Granite State comic con in 2022, Chris is just revealing two new covers for the Lost Years to us! This episode was pulled from the livestream on 03/16/23 where Chris was able to reveal the new images to his cover for The Lost Years #3 and his Inker is former schoolmate Sophie Campbell! (what an on air revelation that was!) Chris talks about his exposure to early TMNT books and his artwork as a whole, and just where his inspiration comes from. A very Maryland Pizza recipe with Pizza Time as well. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/epictalesfromthesewers/message

On this midweek show, Crystal chats with Julie Anderson about her campaign for Washington Secretary of State - why she decided to run, how partisanship affects the office, and the experience she brings to manage the Secretary of State's broad portfolio. With regard to managing elections, they discuss her plans to increase voter turnout, her stance and approach to local jurisdictions potentially adopting alternative systems such as ranked choice voting, and how to handle misinformation that creates mistrust in our elections. Crystal then gives Julie an opportunity to respond to the many attacks from her detractors before switching gears to dig into her thoughts on managing the state archives - both preserving historical records and ensuring that the Public Records Act is administered efficiently and effectively. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com.  Follow us on Twitter at @HacksWonks. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find Julie Anderson at @nonpartisansos.   Resources Campaign Website - Julie Anderson   Transcript   [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington State through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Well, I am very excited to be welcoming to the show - Julie Anderson, who is a candidate for Secretary of State, which is one of the most important and consequential offices in the state and going to be up for election on your November ballot. Welcome, Julie. [00:00:55] Julie Anderson: Thank you, Crystal - and thanks for acknowledging that the Secretary of State's office is really important. It's nice to meet somebody who's excited about picking leadership for the important office. That's - thank you. [00:01:07] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. So what made you decide to run for Secretary of State? [00:01:12] Julie Anderson: Well, I certainly wasn't expecting to do this in 2022 - but definitely the importance of the office. I'm one of the end users of the office - the Secretary of State is my authorizing agency and leader for elections on the county level and also for document recording - so it's an important office to me and I know it's important to the other 38 counties as well. So when Kim picked up and left, I jumped right in. And I was also inspired to do it because I wanted, I saw this as an opportunity to make a shift in the office and run as a Nonpartisan and to hopefully create a little bit of an air bubble in the office and normalize the idea of hiring professional election administrators who aren't associated with the political party. So that's why I'm running. [00:02:10] Crystal Fincher: And that has been a difference this cycle that we've seen - just that people are not familiar with. This office has been held by a Republican for several years, the only statewide office that was previously held by a Republican. With the appointment of former Senator Hobbs to now being Secretary Hobbs, which - a lot of people were advocating for your appointment in that seat, citing your experience for that - but he is there and a Democrat. But you have decided to run as an Independent. Why do you think being Independent is so important to the office? And do you think that we've suffered from having it be a partisan office in the past? [00:02:53] Julie Anderson: One quick thing - I'm making a real point of calling myself Nonpartisan rather than Independent - because as you've noticed in Chris Vance's race, he calls himself an Independent and he has designs on creating an independent third party. I have no designs on creating a group or a party and - I don't have a group - so I am literally nonpartisan. Have we suffered by having partisans in that office before? I think that we've been really lucky with Sam Reed and Kim Wyman taking the job very seriously and performing the job in a nonpartisan fashion. I do think, however, that their party affiliation dragged some unnecessary drama into the office and made their work more difficult. It is a political office and so the opposing team is always looking for a way to knock you off at the end of your term, and is always positioning to put their best candidate forward doing that. So there's always a little jockeying around depriving the incumbent of oxygen and victories so that they're less credible whenever they run for re-election. And then in the electorate, there is also skepticism because we live in an increasingly hyper-polarized political environment, people are just naturally suspicious of somebody that holds a political party that they don't belong to. So those are two reasons why I think that partisanship in this job does not help or add value to the work. And I don't think that having a party affiliation does add value to the policy work or the operations of the office. [00:04:38] Crystal Fincher: Now you have talked a lot about the experience that you bring to this office should you be elected. Can you talk about what your experience has been as Pierce County Auditor and how you feel it's going to be beneficial as Secretary of State? [00:04:51] Julie Anderson: Sure. So for over 12 years - 13 in November - I've been the nonpartisan county auditor for Pierce County, which is our state's second largest county. Which means I've conducted hundreds of elections in Washington State and have also presided over a recording document program - making recording documents, preserving them, and making them accessible to the public - and then also business registry and licensing. So with that experience, I'm familiar from the bottom up with Washington State's votewa.gov election management system because my team was part of, really, building it along with other lead counties and obviously the Secretary of State's office. I sat on the Executive Steering Committee while that was under development and when it launched and went live in 2019. So having that background, I think helps, puts me in a position to better help the county auditors and the election administrators using that system. It also helps me to design and implement policy proposals for the Legislature to consider since I know how the system works. And it also puts me in a position for visioning how to modernize the office, what the needs are to go the next step, and where the gaps are. And when we're talking about elections - where the gaps are specifically - we don't have a lot of residual gains left to make in Washington State, but the ones that we do need to make are going to be the most difficult and challenging. And I think that's where experience matters. [00:06:33] Crystal Fincher: It absolutely matters - and it matters for more than just the elections too. The elections are certainly the most visible part of what the Secretary of State does, but it has such a broad portfolio of responsibilities. And just recapping those briefly for people who may be unfamiliar. In addition to supervising local elections, filing and verifying initiatives and referenda, and distributing the Voters' Pamphlets - also responsible for registering private corporations, limited partnerships and trademarks; registering individuals and organizations, and commercial fundraisers involved in charitable solicitations; administering the state's Address Confidentiality program, which is critically important for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking - so very important too, public safety really - collecting and preserving the historical records of the state and making those records available for research; coordinating implementation of the state's records management laws, which are constantly in the news for one reason or another; affixing the state's seal; regulating use of the seal; filing and attesting to official acts of the governor; certifying what the Legislature does; and sometimes even called upon to represent the state in international trade and cultural missions and greeting dignitaries. There's so much under that umbrella, each of which seems like it could potentially be its own office really, but so broad. How has your experience as an auditor helped to prepare you for the full portfolio of what you're going to be managing if you're elected to be Secretary of State? [00:08:07] Julie Anderson: I would say it's auditor plus my whole professional portfolio. So I come with public and nonprofit leadership experience in human services, criminal justice, and economic development. I was notably the Executive Director of the YWCA in Tacoma-Pierce County, so that speaks to the sensitivity and understanding of the Address Confidentiality Program, and I can tell you how I would apply that to expand that program. And then in economic development, I was a Senior Policy Advisor for the State Department of Commerce, where my portfolio included workforce development and developing a green economy and also innovation zones. But that body of work in the public and nonprofit sector means that I'm really tuned into the importance of community, and the unique conditions in community, and understanding that I have to have a partnership in community to do any of those things well. A top-down management model or staying isolated in that executive position is not going to make the organization better or better connected with the citizens and residents of Washington. And we don't just serve citizens, we serve the residents of Washington State. So I think that my community connections and my work on the 2020 census, for example, I have some great ideas about how to engage community in each of those programs, whether it's talking about voter turnout, access for people living with disabilities, or how we are talking about curating the heritage and history of Washington State to make sure that we don't disappear people and cultures and make sure that we're doing culturally relevant screening of our collection and portfolio and working in partnership with community to do that. [00:10:04] Crystal Fincher: So now you mentioned voter engagement and turnout - you've talked on a few occasions about efforts to increase voter registration, and increasing voter registration is not necessarily consistent with increasing voter turnout. What do you propose to do to increase voter turnout, to increase the amount of people who are participating in our government and democracy, making their voices heard? And how are you going to go about that? [00:10:32] Julie Anderson: Well, it's my belief that election administrators are facilitators, not catalysts. And looping back to community, I'm going to leverage community a lot. For example, I think you have to pay attention, first of all, to data and trends. We know that the four-year election cycle has really unique peaks and valleys that are pretty darn predictable. In a presidential election cycle, we probably don't need a lot of help with getting the word out. But in these off-year elections and in local elections, we need a tremendous amount of help because that's when voter turnout is the lowest. One of the things that I would propose doing is partnering with local government and with schools to focus on municipal elections and pooling resources and having - the Secretary of State can certainly provide materials and infrastructure, but the execution of how that gets delivered in a community is going to be unique in every community. But I can see municipalities all focusing their energy on a one-week period where we're getting voters prepared to vote, getting them to develop a plan, and helping them if they need reminding about what their local government does for them and with them. And then partnering with schools in that same one-week period where you're doing some education in schools about local government and then challenging kids to go home and talk to their parents about the election, so they can have a dinner table, a kitchen table conversation about it. So there's concentrated energy in just one week, it's hyper-localized - because strategies that are going to work in Asotin County is going to be completely different than King County - and locals know best. So I see myself as being a facilitator and having local communities tell the Secretary of State how I can help. But at least laying out a plan and applying some leadership to get everybody pulling in one direction, concentrating on one week, I think would be helpful. You have probably visited my website and you also know that I plan a VOICE Program, which is Voter Outreach and Innovative Civic Engagement, where I'd be replicating some really successful strategies from the 2020 Census, pooling philanthropic dollars with government dollars, and then having a very low-barrier granting program where communities can propose their own voter outreach and engagement programs. And again, I can't wait to see how creative people are, and it's going to get very - we're going to get some very niche products, but yeah. So those are a couple of ideas, but I would say that the first thing is really paying attention to the data, not just the trends that I talked about - which elections have low turnout and don't - but also geography. One of the great things about the Washington State Voting Rights Act that has been proposed - we already have a Voting Rights Act, but what I think of as Phase 2 that's been proposed - is it came with money and authority for the University of Washington to hold data and they're going to be getting electoral inputs, like candidate filing, rates of voter registration, rates of ballot return, and combining that with demographic data. And doing basically heat mapping and analysis so that we can also look at geographic areas and populations that have low voter turnout or low levels of engagement. So let's pay attention to the trends, let's pay attention to what that Washington State Voting Rights Act data tells us, and start developing strategies in response to that. [00:14:28] Crystal Fincher: That makes sense, and the ideas that you have - especially that one week, I'd love to see that implemented - that would be exciting. There are also efforts to increase turnout through some structural changes to the ways that we vote, and there are changes that are on the ballot in several jurisdictions right now in our state, including ranked choice voting, approval voting, a number of different things. Are you in favor of ranked choice voting, approval voting, some of these changes? Do you support those? [00:14:55] Julie Anderson: I support the local option bill for ranked choice voting that has been kicking around in the Legislature for about six years now, and I look forward to supporting local jurisdictions that want to adopt ranked choice voting. I think it is head and shoulders the leader in electoral reform proposals, and it seems to be particularly popular among young voters - and Gen Xers and Millennials are going to be the biggest share of the voting population by 2028 - if we're talking about increasing voter turnout, we've also got to look at youth and really change the way we talk with youth - not talk at them, and not using government channels. I look forward to harnessing some of that young adult leadership and having them tell us the best ways to engage with young voters, and one of the things that they're saying is ranked choice voting. There's a lot of disenchantment with our primary system, and I think that they're really looking for alternatives and wanting untraditional candidates and maybe minority party candidates to have a fighting chance in the primary. So I think they're excited about that, and if your community decides to take it on, I'm ready to support. There's a load of work to be done to make ranked choice voting successful, and there's a lot of rulemaking that falls on the Secretary of State, so one of the first things I'm going to do is gather together a cohort of communities that are seriously talking about this and start working on the rulemaking so that we have a chance of having some standardization as this rolls out. [00:16:32] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely, and one component of that that I think is particularly important - I'm wondering what your perspective is on it - is the voter education component. Whenever there is a change - we struggle with our existing system to make sure everyone understands how to make sure that everyone understands how to vote, and even something like - hey, remember to sign the ballot - still slips through the cracks for a lot of people. Several things can seem very intuitive, but maybe not actually be for everyone for a lot of different reasons. When we're making a major change, the importance of education is that much greater. How do you propose, when there are changes, to make sure that we do have an adequate amount of voter education in all of our communities across the state so that people aren't intimidated or disenfranchised by the change? [00:17:23] Julie Anderson: First, taking a clue with other states that have been doing this a while - I've been through several webinars and in-person visits with jurisdictions that do it. But instead of just copying what somebody else does, I want to do usability testing. Assume nothing. Let's get that cohort together, let's get stakeholders and end users together. Do mock ballots, do mock voter instructions. And actually test it through scientific usability testing and find out where the errors are going to be made and what we can do to change it. And that includes - ranked choice voting ballots that may need to be translated for people that don't speak English well, or different types of ranked choice voting - that's the other thing that's not well understood is - the local option doesn't force you to combine a primary and a general election and just have one election. It's an option. It also leaves open the opportunity for applying a ranked choice voting ballot and using proportional representation elections. There's all sorts of different ways that a ranked choice voting ballot can be applied depending on what the jurisdiction is trying to achieve. We need to do usability testing in all of those forms. [00:18:44] Crystal Fincher: Looking at that and the coordination that's necessary for that, your opponent has talked about - hey, there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation out in the current environment. Now's not the time to make changes, we're experiencing enough of a crisis with trust from some people in our current systems - it's going to require a lot of education, may disenfranchise people. Do you think that's reason enough to not move forward with things that could potentially increase turnout or help better represent communities? [00:19:17] Julie Anderson: Name a reform that didn't have opposition. Name a reform that didn't have barriers and reasons not to do it. Reform is hard in the beginning, and I think we need to have more confidence than that. We need to approach it carefully. We need to do that usability testing. We need to do lots of voter education. Tactically, one of the things that I would like to do - you've noticed on my website, one of the things I propose with transparency is - I want to find a secure way to have voted ballots and cast vote records visible to the public. Other states do it. There is a way to do it. We may need legislation - because paramount is preserving voter privacy, right? That goes without saying. We absolutely can't do it if we can't guarantee voter privacy. But if there is a way that we can, and I believe that there is, and if we can get rules made by the Secretary or legislative fixes, then making those available is really going to help demystify people who don't trust a ranked choice voting ballot and the algorithm that gets used to reallocate votes. If we can make cast vote records public, there is open source software available where they can run the records themselves and retest the vote allocation if they want to. So, I want to look at things like that not only because there is a lot of public interest in auditing elections, but because it also is an enabling feature to making ranked choice voting more understandable and independently auditable. And there is some really neat communication tools that other jurisdictions have used in terms of color coding the reallocation of votes between each round, and they've gotten good results. [00:21:13] Crystal Fincher: And the issue of trust overall is one that you will have to contend with. [00:21:17] Julie Anderson: Always. [00:21:17] Crystal Fincher: We are dealing with an environment where there is certainly disinformation and people who are just spreading information that is false, whether it's denial of the 2020 election federally, or in our state and local elections, who question the security of vote by mail, of ballot dropboxes, of a variety of things that we have implemented successfully. And what they cite about them is false. That's a bad faith effort. But because of that bad faith effort, there are a lot of people who genuinely believe that there are problems - from all sorts of backgrounds, for all sorts of reasons. So how, in this environment where there is disinformation, do you help increase trust in our voting systems and our electoral system with people who frankly just don't have faith in it currently? [00:22:13] Julie Anderson: First of all, not acting defensively, and not acting aggressively, and having a nonpartisan message. The best thing that we can do to maintain and increase confidence is to keep doing what we're doing, which is running error-free elections that are auditable and serve the people. We can do some minor things that I've suggested on my website for transparency. We can do additional risk-limiting audits. Doing a statewide risk-limiting audit, I think, is a good idea. We currently have audits in counties that are called by the political parties, but they're not statistically valid batches of ballots that are being hand counted, and every county is counting a different race. To the Loren Culps of the world, who are just mystified by how the top-of-the-ticket candidate could lose, while the down-ballot candidates prevail, a statewide risk-limiting audit would be really helpful. And by the way, I would be proposing this as a best practice, even if we weren't currently getting pushback from candidates and parties. But to loop back to your question about confidence. Crystal, this is where I think that the nonpartisanship really helps. There's a good study out there that shows that you can, by double digits, move - and this is a phrase I do not like to use, but for shorthand's sake, let's say an election denier, somebody that really believes that the 2020 election was stolen. Even among that group, you can move them by double digits into the confidence tally by simply talking about the due process and the ability to challenge an election. Instead of acting aggressively and defensively about the accusation that it's stolen, just calmly educate them and inform them how elections can be challenged, the due process, how they can challenge individual voter registrations, and repeat how interested we are in any evidence that they have, and that we don't even need them to go to court for them to present us with evidence. I'm still waiting in Pierce County to get some of that canvassing work that the communities say - the door-to-door stuff that they're doing. They're not doing it in Pierce County, but I'm waiting for that because we can sit down and walk through the data with them. And almost always, it's a misconception of - either they're missing pieces that they don't know, or they're misinterpreting the data - and we can walk through it. And occasionally, I would expect to find a correct case. Occasionally, I would expect them to find, among 4.7 million voters and voter registrations, an error in a voter registration record - and we want to know about it and need help fixing it. [00:25:30] Crystal Fincher: Now, you talk about it - that seems reasonable, that is encouraging data and research, and there's certainly a lot that we can talk to people about with that. And it does seem like not being a partisan may be helpful in explaining that - the trust and faith that people have there. But you've been under attack from the Chair of the Democratic Party over this past week. It looks like saying that - oh, no, no, no, Julie Anderson is a partisan, she is a Republican, has a - I will read it and allow you to respond. I see - testified against bills expanding voter accessibility, against election officials promoting voter outreach and education, office sent flawed ballots, takes no position on campaign finance laws, accountable to no one, have talked about having a consultant and campaign staff or consultants who are Republicans and have supported Republicans. Now, I will say - there are quite a few Democrats that I saw question this and say - especially from Pierce County - saying, well, we've regularly seen Julie Anderson in Democratic events also. But some people countered with - well, now we're looking at her with JT Wilcox. I guess starting with the partisanship, and now you're actually associated with Republicans - and I think Rob McKenna has notably talked about endorsing and supporting you - you have been at those events. Can people credibly see you as a Nonpartisan when they see these associations and these endorsements? [00:27:16] Julie Anderson: Sure. I'm a Nonpartisan because I don't belong to any political party, which is different than not talking to anybody. I am not soliciting or accepting any endorsements from any political party, and I'm also not soliciting or accepting any money. But I regularly ask to be introduced. I try to break into legislative meetings and PCO meetings of both parties. Sometimes they'll let me in to introduce myself, sometimes they won't. I asked JT Wilcox if I could crash his salmon bake because I wanted to meet Republicans, and he said yes. And I'm sure that he got a rash of - from his supporters - for having me there. But just not belonging to a party doesn't mean that I don't talk with people, and I think that's important for the Secretary of State to do. One of the critiques is that I'm accountable to no one - I'm accountable to voters, and I've been re-elected overwhelmingly three times as an election administrator in Pierce County, so I have earned the trust and the votes of the residents of Pierce County who have seen me in action. I think it says something that the political parties don't run opponents against me. Presumably if I'm bad and bad for their party's interests, they're going to run somebody against me. The people who are working on my campaign - it was very difficult to find any consultancy that would take me on as a client because there were both credible Republicans and credible Democrats running in the race, and here comes this Nonpartisan lady wanting a contract with them. That's a business model and a relationship they didn't want to ruin, and so it was very hard to find somebody. I ended up getting a referral from Mary Robnett, who's the Pierce County Prosecutor who ran as a Nonpartisan, and I said, who were your consultants? And she introduced me to Josh Amato, and he has been associated as a Republican, I don't even know if he's still a Republican - I'm imagining that he is - and he has worked on Republican campaigns and Nonpartisan campaigns. This is an income-constrained campaign. I do not have a lot of money. I have been having to run this campaign the way I'll run the Secretary of State's office, which is modestly and judiciously. So I had to wait until the general election to hire a staff person, and when I did, I chose a young gentleman who came from the Derek Kilmer campaign, and had worked on Emily Randall's campaign, and worked with the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. It is true that I contracted with an independent vendor for PR in the primary, and she had Republican roots. But my detractors are cherry-picking - they also failed to notice that I hired a fundraiser who is very progressive and comes from the non-profit community, so I think I'm pretty balanced in who vendors, what kind of vendors are helping me. But most importantly, the vendors don't boss the candidate around. I'm the one that's responsible for every single policy position that you hear me talk about. Do you think the Republican consultant was happy about me saying I support ranked choice voting in the Washington State Voting Rights Act? No, he thought that that was a crazy thing to do - but I'm the boss, not him. I've lost track of the attacks. What other attacks do we want to look at? [00:31:07] Crystal Fincher: Well, I think one worth addressing is testifying against bills expanding voter accessibility - and I think that one, maybe for voters, is probably a concern. If looking at Republicans - hearing the attacks on seemingly democracy, partisanship - hey, we want to stop same-day registration, we don't like vote by mail, we need to reduce the amount of drop boxes, and the types of reforms that we have embraced here in Washington State - and is that going to impact where you stand on those issues and how much of a leader you are there? [00:31:47] Julie Anderson: So, in testifying, I had a leadership role in the statewide Association of County Auditors. So, I was either the Legislative Co-chair on the Legislative Committee or the President. And 39 counties come to a consensus on what their position on bills is - and because of proximity or leadership position, I was often asked to represent the association on those bills. Crystal, name for me a legislative proposal that is perfect on the first day that it's introduced. [00:32:18] Crystal Fincher: Well, I can't do that. I can't do that. [00:32:20] Julie Anderson: Not many. Many of them need to, in the legislative process - through testimony, stakeholder engagement, and the amendment process - needs to be changed. And often county auditors, who are the ones that have to operationalize good ideas and bad ideas, have feedback and have concerns. Most of that testimony was done at a time when the state wasn't paying for state elections, and it was all falling back on county general funds. It wasn't until 2020 that the state passed a bill to start funding their share of state elections, and it didn't take effect until 2021, which does us no good - it's really going to make an impact this year. So, a lot of the testimony was driven by our concerns about resources, time, money, and staffing to get done some complicated things. In other cases, it was technology. So, same-day registration only became viable when we had VoteWA up and running so that we had real-time visibility on registration and balloting transactions around the state. And I will say - again, cherry-picking, my detractors are - in as early as 2015, I was personally advocating for the Washington State Voting Rights Act well before it got passed, even though the association either had a neutral stance or they had constructive feedback and testimony. So, I am a strong supporter of vote-by-mail, strong supporter of same-day registration, strong supporter of just about every electoral reform that's taken place since 2016. And the expansion of ballot dropboxes - I know that one piece of feedback that's been fluttering around is my opposition to dropboxes on college campuses - again, in my role as, in the Association of County Auditors. And - like in Pierce County, at that time, I was really struggling for expanding dropboxes, period, in my community. And I knew, using that geographical and demographic data and that voter turnout data that I used to make decisions, I knew that there were pockets in my community that really could have benefited from a ballot dropbox - as opposed to the University of Washington of Tacoma, which is a commuter school, not a residential school with young people far-flung from all over the United States that might be confused about how to get a ballot or how to register. It's a commuter school. And having a ballot dropbox on that campus, where people are driving to and from their homes to classes, and not being able to install a box at the Housing Authority or at Manitou, which - anyway, you don't know my neighborhoods. [00:35:35] Crystal Fincher: I know a little bit. [00:35:37] Julie Anderson: Okay. All right, all right. So that didn't make a lot of sense to me, and I stand by that. I really think that the control of where ballot dropboxes go should be local, using local intelligence and local needs. I completely support the threshold, like population standards. And by the way, all of this wraps around to why I support the Washington State Voting Rights Act, and the expanded version that's going to come up in session again this year. Right now, we have a Voting Rights Act that is really specifically tailored or focused on vote dilution and that helped us get through redistricting safely. But we are now talking about vote denial and vote abridgment. And I support it strongly for this very reason. If you're going to give local election administrators control over where to place ballot dropboxes, we need to make sure it's not at the detriment of protected populations and that it's doing the most good. And I like that kind of structure. [00:36:47] Crystal Fincher: And I hear you there. I guess the questions that pop up for me personally when I hear that are - one, for me, ideally, shouldn't we be able to find a way to place them in more places, period? And should being a commuter location or a commuter school, given that we aren't limited to returning ballots in a jurisdiction where we're registered, where we vote - a lot of people do commute there, which means a lot of people are there. It's a convenient place to be able to vote. It's an enfranchising thing, even though it may not be for the particular precinct that that ballot dropbox is located in, or neighborhood. Do you factor those things in to making your decisions there? [00:37:34] Julie Anderson: Oh, yeah - I'm making a rookie mistake getting into an argument with the host. So it made perfect sense when I was able to place it at the transit station on the street of Pacific Avenue, just outside of UWT, as opposed to inside a pedestrian plaza not accessible by an automobile and not visible to the general public. And also, by the way, very hard to geolocate on Google Maps for people that are searching for a place to drop their ballot. I do think that the number of ballot dropboxes is increasing - the number is worth looking at, especially because we don't know what's going to happen with the United States Postal Service. By the way, I would work hard as Secretary of State to work with letter carriers to preserve door-to-door delivery. But if that doesn't happen and Congress continues to privatize that service, we need to be prepared and with more dropboxes. And you know something - the Voting Rights Act and UW's data collection that they're going to be doing is going to be very informative about whether we have enough ballot dropboxes and if we have them in the right place. So I'm completely open to it - I just don't like the Legislature deciding where they go. I want to be holistic, data-driven with local intelligence. [00:39:05] Crystal Fincher: That absolutely makes sense. The other one I just want to get to - just talking about accuracy - we've actually seen errors in a number of jurisdictions in a number of ways - from misprinted Voters' Pamphlets, ballots that have to be reprinted. There was talk you provided voters false information and lost 100 cast ballots. What happened there? [00:39:30] Julie Anderson: Okay, two separate incidents, and you're right - errors happen all over the state and all over the country - reminding us all that elections is a human process. We leverage technology a lot, but it requires expertise and a lot of proofreading and sometimes things slip through the crack. In one case, the vendor that Pierce County - well actually, the vendor that is used by over 60% of the electorate in Washington State, K&H - made an error when we mailed out ballots to our military voters and 88 voters out of 550,000 were impacted. What happened was they shuffled the return envelope with the mailer so that 88 people got a ballot packet on time, but the return ballot had somebody else's name on it. When we found out about that, we immediately contacted the voters, reissued the ballots, and immediately sent out a press release. That's what you can count on from me - is tattling on myself, telling people, taking corrective action, and doing whatever we can to make sure it doesn't happen again. In that case, I amended the contract with the provider that said next time you have a machine stoppage and you've got a set of quality control procedures that you use - this is like using your Xerox in your office or your home where you have a paper jam, and then by the time you finish ripping everything out, you've got to figure - do I reprint the whole document or do I figure out what page I left out on? The quality control at that plant is to reprint the whole darn thing, and somebody on the line decided that would be wasteful and they didn't do it. And so I amended the contract to say there's going to be consequences if you deviate from your own quality control. In the infamous case in 2016 where Pierce County urged voters to, if they were going to use the United States Postal Service, to do so - let's see, I think it was 5 days before the election - but if they were going to use a drop and to please use a dropbox otherwise. The allegation says that we were sued - we were not sued. There was a threat of a lawsuit and at the end of the day - what the Democratic Party wanted was for me to mail out a postcard to voters saying that's advice not a requirement, and they wanted me to make that clear on our website. And so that's what we did. And at the end of the day, the attorneys agreed we did nothing illegal. And we haven't done it again since because it created such a stir and so much upset. So we don't even give people advice anymore about - if they're using the Postal Service to do it early, but you should. [00:42:45] Crystal Fincher: Well and yeah - that's the complicated thing. And as someone who is interested in making sure people not only vote, but that their votes get counted and they arrive on time, we are experiencing more challenges with the United States Post Office. There is some uncertainty and certainly at the time, during the 2016 election, there's lots of conversation about potentially challenges with mailing things. So I do generally advise people to mail as early as you can if you're going to do that, but yeah - so I am glad we have gotten some clarity on a number of these issues, but also want to ask about some other things. I guess one of them is talking about preserving the historical records of the State and making them readily available to the public. What are your plans there and how can you make those more accessible and available to researchers, to the public, to everyone? [00:43:41] Julie Anderson: A couple of things. One, the Secretary of State's office, I think, is behind in terms of digitizing paper records and getting them indexed and available. I do believe that my opponent has invested in additional scanning equipment, so that's a good thing. I don't know if they have sufficient FTEs to do that - I'll have to look at that when I get there. But my big concern is looking towards the future government - so our state archives hold all of the records that are produced by local and state government that have permanent retention value all the way from territorial days to right this minute. And in the last 10 years, government has been producing a heck of a lot of digital native, digital born documents that never were a piece of paper. And in my experience, our state archives still has a paper mindset because they're used to working with precious ephemera and paper documents. But we've been producing tons of native, digital born documents that are complex and interactive. Is the Secretary of State's office ready to ingest a high volume of digital records that are interactive and richly indexed, and turn them around and make them accessible to the public? I don't think so, and that's a project that I want to tackle right away. If you think about everything that just happened with redistricting - with all of those maps that were generated, so many different versions - and if you tracked it, you know that that was highly interactive data, right? You could move lines around. That is a record. Is it being preserved in that state, that interactive state, or are the maps being preserved? So those are the questions I'm interested in and want us to be forward thinking about. I am a certified public records officer, so I am very passionate about public access to public information and one of the things that the Secretary of State's office needs to do - there's two things - is provide more training to local records officers and maybe even a camp for requesters. I think that would be a good idea. [00:46:05] Crystal Fincher: No, I think that's excellent and was leading into - the next thing I wanted to talk about was document retention and how closely linked it is with records requests. And we're seeing challenges in that area in jurisdictions across the state - one, in properly retaining the correct records. But the purpose of that retention is so that they can be accessed and provided to people who are entitled to see them, including the public. And we are seeing and hearing reports from a number of reporters and people making requests in jurisdictions across the state who are receiving increased wait times, increased estimates of wait times - sometimes comically long, decades long wait times - for some of those requests potentially. Hearing that localities are short staffed - it's challenging to respond to these kinds of things. And even getting into accusations of bad faith use of the public disclosure request system and records request system - some people trying to do that. Or on the flip side, people just being unhappy about receiving a request and having something looked into and calling things a bad faith attack and looking to delay the process, maybe unnecessarily, in those. How can you help make that process more consistent, help localities handle those in a more consistent way so that people can request and receive public documents when they're entitled to them? [00:47:46] Julie Anderson: Two things - I'm going to be the Secretary of State that's known as a "Clean your closet, kid" Secretary of State. Government is producing more records than ever and they don't know what to do with them. If you don't know how to store them, then you can't find them. So record retention is about record management. The Secretary of State's office used to have a pretty good training program for records officers about that. That needs to be rebooted and redoubled and it needs to have a modernized context. I cannot tell you how many emails are generated hourly by government. We don't know which of those are important or not until you have a sorting and classification system that you maintain constantly that marries emails with the associated documents, right? So that's something that we did in Pierce County. I want to take that passion with me to the Secretary of State's office and hire somebody that's an expert at this to help train local government. And I'll also be an advocate for resources for local government. There are some jurisdictions that are literally drowning and they're also having turnover issues. So I do want them to have resources, but first of all they got to know how to clean their room. [00:49:10] Crystal Fincher: So as we close and as people are trying to figure out how to make this decision - they hear from you, they hear from your opponent, lots of outside groups, and a lot of noise. When you are talking to someone who is considering making this choice between you and your opponent, does not know which direction they're going to go, what do you tell them to help make that decision? [00:49:32] Julie Anderson: That like them, I love Washington State's election laws - want to preserve them, make them even better. And for the first time in history, they have a choice of hiring somebody that's a professional administrator with expertise in these subjects without party strings attached. [00:49:52] Crystal Fincher: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, join us today, and letting the voters just get more familiar with you. Much appreciated. [00:50:01] Julie Anderson: Thank you. Thank you for the questions. And I love that you're a fan of the Public Records Act. [00:50:06] Crystal Fincher: I'm such a fan of it - and if it's follow up and organizations being accountable to adhering to it. But yes, thank you so much. [00:50:16] Julie Anderson: You're welcome - bye bye. [00:50:18] Crystal Fincher: Thank you all for listening to Hacks & Wonks. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Lisl Stadler. Our assistant producer is Shannon Cheng, and our Post-Production Assistant is Bryce Cannatelli. You can find Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks, and you can follow me @finchfrii, spelled F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. 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On today's Hacks & Wonks week-in-review, Crystal is joined by Associate Editor of The Stranger, Rich Smith. They start this week discussing the heatwave currently affecting western Washington, and how despite the real risks to some of our most vulnerable neighbors, the city moved forward with a sweep of a homeless encampment. Rich points out that there's not actually adequate housing for all of those hurt by the sweep, and discusses how legal action might be the necessary catalyst to get the city to change its behavior when it comes to handling our homelessnes crisis. In specific races, Crystal and Rich discuss the Congressional race in Washington's 8th Congressional District, where three Republicans are vying for the chance to take Kim Schrier's seat. They next follow-up on the horrifying pattern of Black electeds, candidates, and campaign staff being harassed, threatened, and attacked, and the lack of resources and support from the HDCC to protect candidates of color. Next, they look at the 47th legislative district's Senate and House races, both of which have very competitive D-on-D races happening during the primary. Rich explains the Stranger's Editorial Control Board's struggle to pick who to endorse in the 34th's State Rep. position 1 race. Crystal and Rich talk about the disproportionate amount of money going to D-on-D races in districts that are safely Democrat, and what needs to be done to make sure campaign finance needs are less of a barrier for candidates. After that, they go over close-looking races between Democrats and Republicans across the state. Finally, they remind you to VOTE! Ballots are due August 2nd. Make your voice heard!  As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Rich Smith, at @richsssmith.  More info is available at officialhacksandwonks.com.   WA Voting Resources Ballot and replacement ballot information: https://voter.votewa.gov/WhereToVote.aspx    Ballot Box and voting center locations: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/research/drop-box-and-voting-center-locations.aspx    If you're an eligible voter with previous felony convictions, you CAN vote as long as you're no longer confined. For more information, see here: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/felons-and-voting-rights.aspx    Resources   “Seattle removes homeless encampment in Sodo during heat wave” by Greg Kim from The Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/seattle-removes-homeless-encampment-in-sodo-during-heat-wave/    “A new push to combat harassment of Black candidates and staff” by Melissa Santos from Axios: https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2022/07/25/black-candidates-washington-harassment   “Republicans vie for swing-district shot at defeating WA Rep. Kim Schrier” by Jim Brunner from The Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/republicans-vie-for-swing-district-shot-at-defeating-democrat-rep-kim-schrier/   “Northeast Seattle House race features 5 Democratic candidates and big money” by David Gutman from The Seattle Times:  https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/northeast-seattle-house-race-features-5-democratic-candidates-and-big-money/   “Seattle voters have a slew of choices in Legislative races” by Joseph O'Sullivan from Crosscut: https://crosscut.com/politics/2022/07/seattle-voters-have-slew-choices-legislative-races    Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks and Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington State through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show, as well as our recent forums, are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today, we're continuing our Friday almost-live shows where we review the news of the week. Welcome back to the program today's co-host: Associate Editor of The Stranger and - never forget - noted poet, Rich Smith. [00:00:55] Rich Smith: Hi. [00:00:55] Crystal Fincher: Hey, so it's been a hot week. We're in the middle of another heat event, climate change is unrelenting, and we're feeling the effects of it. It's been a challenge. [00:01:09] Rich Smith: Yeah, I'm against it. I don't think it should be happening. Seattle really is dying, as is the rest of the globe, is my understanding. [00:01:19] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. We just saw Europe go through this right before we did. And I'm sure we're all going to be going through it with increasing frequency, which makes one thing that happened this week, just particularly - not just unfortunate, but really infuriating to a lot of people - and plainly harmful. It's that the City of Seattle decided to move forward with sweeps of encampments for the unhoused in the middle of this heat wave. What went on here? [00:01:50] Rich Smith: Yeah, they - Bruce Harrell has made a point to deal with visible homelessness by employing a tactic that has not worked, which is sweeping people around the City, and in the middle of a heat wave, he swept a city, or a spot a little bit south of downtown. I wasn't - I'm not quite sure on the address. I think there was about 30 people there. And first thing in the morning - sun was heating up, these people had to put all their belongings on their back, and move across town, or find a cooling shelter or - in the heat. And it was just cruel and unfortunately, not unusual. And I can't even blog in this heat, let alone move all of my earthly possessions across town, just because somebody doesn't want to see me there. So that's what happened. [00:02:53] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and it is - a lot of people understand that this really makes no sense to do - it's harmful, it's against public health guidance. We're still in a pandemic - even though people want to be done with it, it's not done with us. We have more challenges in that direction coming our way, which we might touch on a little bit later. But even with this, there were a lot of community members who reached out to the mayor's office when they heard about this and heard that it was upcoming. This is on the heels of last summer - the heat dome event being the most deadly weather event that Washington has ever experienced. We know how lethal extreme heat is. And so for people who don't have any kind of shelter to be put through this at this particular time, and as a lot of activists talked about and actually Councilmember Tammy Morales called out before, since and after - there's not enough shelter space, there's not enough housing space to get all of these people in shelter. To which Bruce Harrell and his administration replied - well, there's space at cooling centers and we can get them vouchers to go there. But those aren't 24/7 - that's a very, very temporary solution. So you know that you're throwing people out, certainly at night, and tomorrow when there's extreme heat again - 90+ degree temperatures - where do they go then? And they have even less to work with in order to do that. It's just - as you said in the very beginning - it's ineffective, this doesn't get people in housing. Some people talk about homelessness being primarily a problem of addiction or of mental health resources - that's not the case for everybody, but the one thing that everyone who is - does not have a home - has in common is not having a home. Housing is the one thing that will, that we can't do without to solve homelessness. We have to start there. And so to act as if this is doing anything different, when over and over again, we see when they sweep a location, the people who were there just move to different locations in the City. We don't get people housed, we're doing nothing but making this problem worse while wasting so much money in the process of doing so. It's just infuriating and I really hope it stops. There's not really a reason to believe so, based on the track record in this area of this administration, but it's wrong and there's really no two ways about that. [00:05:25] Rich Smith: Yeah, and just to hop on that Tammy Morales point and the reporting that The Times did on the ground, there's this - the administration thinks that they're offering everybody shelter, they say that they're offering everybody shelter. And then reporters go there and ask around and people say - nobody offered me anything. A couple people said - I'm gonna take this tent down the road, I'm not gonna get to that shelter. And so I just think that the City needs to start getting sued for this stuff. I just - if a referral system is clearly adequately not functional, and we're not supposed to - under Martin v. Boise - sweep people unless we have adequate shelter to put them in. And if we haven't created a system that gets people into adequate shelter that meets their needs, then how is it legal? is my question. And I don't think that this is gonna stop until there starts to be legal consequences for the City. [00:06:29] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and like you said, there is precedent - that's a fairly recent decision, that we seem to be acting - in Seattle and in other cities - in direct defiance of, so I hope along with you that it is challenged in court. It's a big problem that continues. We're doing nothing to solve this issue that everyone recognizes is a crisis, and it's time we start doing things that actually work to make the problem better instead of wasting money on things that just perpetuate the issues that we're having. So this week, we're - Friday, July 29th - we are just days before this August 2nd primary on Tuesday, which means if you have your ballots, you better fill them out and get them in. Have any questions - feel free to reach out to us here at officialhacksandwonks.com, us on Twitter. You can go to MyVote.wa.gov if you are having issues with your ballot - I know there're places like Ferndale in the state that're experiencing extreme post office delays and some people still haven't received their ballots up there. But any issues that you're having can probably be addressed by starting out at MyVote.wa.gov, but do not pass up this opportunity to make your voice heard. There is so much at stake. As frustrated as sometimes we can be with how things are happening federally, whether it's the Supreme Court or seeming inaction in Congress - although we may have gotten some encouraging week this past week, encouraging news this past week - it is really important to act locally. Especially with things being in disarray at the federal level, the state and local level is where we protect the rights that we count on. It's where we shape what our communities look like. And the fact that they can look as different as Forks and Sequim and Seattle and Bellevue and all the rest just is a testament to how much power communities have to shape what they look like. So get engaged, be involved and - just starting out, we've seen just a slew of activity. We'll start the conversation around the Congressional districts, the Congressional races. What is happening in the 8th Congressional District where Kim Schrier is the current incumbent? [00:08:46] Rich Smith: This is - yeah - the front of the national red wave in Washington, to the extent that it crashes down here or gets held, it'll be in the 8th, which is east King County District now. It got changed around a little bit with redistricting - picking up some pieces of Snohomish County, but also some rural areas that it didn't have before. And Schrier faces a challenge from three Republicans minimum - there's a bunch of other people who aren't viable, but the major ones are Reagan Dunn, a King County Councilmember who's also a Republican and whose mom represented the district - I think in the 90s and early '00s - so a little bit of a legacy candidate there for Dunn. He has, as a brief aside, been also awarded by me just now the trophy of using his personal or his professional press release apparatus through the County Council in the most abusive way I've ever seen. This man sends out a press release about some kind of Republican red meat he's doing on the council, literally every eight hours, and it has been for the last year. If this is what he thinks doing his job on council means, then he hasn't been doing it since before this year. But anyway, Reagan Dunn is one of them. And Matt Larkin, a failed Attorney General candidate, who's going for the red meat Trump vote more openly than the other two are at least is is also running. He's got a bunch of his own money in - I wanna say north of $500,000, but maybe it's just $300,000. And and then we've got Jesse Jensen who ran last time. He's a veteran and a tech manager and he almost - he lost to Schrier in 2020 by four points. And so the Republicans are bickering amongst themselves with Jensen spending some, or a PAC on behalf of Jensen spending some money bringing up Dunn's - his struggles with alcoholism, and his divorce, and a bunch of drama related to that. And Dunn pushing back against that and calling it cheap blows. And Matt Larkin just trying to pick up any pieces that fall from that spat and capitalize on it. Schrier will, I suspect, will get through and it'll just be - which of these icky guys is gonna challenge her. [00:11:31] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, it's really interesting to see. And the theme of our congressional primaries and many of these races is - yeah, Republicans are fighting amongst each other in some really interesting, sometimes entertaining, but also vicious ways among each other. And so in this race it's been interesting to see, I think particularly just as people who live in King County and who have seen Reagan Dunn operate for a while - for a while he used to kind of court and relish his - the impression of him being a more moderate Republican, or Republican who can be elected in King County and touted that for a while. But now the base is different than it used to be when it comes to Republicans - they are not in the mood for a - someone who's moderate enough to be elected in King County and his votes, his rhetoric, the way he operates has completely reflected that. Including voting against women's reproductive rights, against abortion rights and access - really is, as you just talked about, trying to appeal to the Trump-loving red meat base and prove that he is conservative enough to do that. And just speaking a lot differently than he did before. But I think this is just reflective of - there are no - really, there is no such thing as a Republican moderate. Because everyone who has called themselves a moderate on issues of any kind of importance - at most - is silent. They won't oppose their party on things that they know are blatantly wrong, whether it's the lie of the 2020 election and the conspiracies surrounding that or vaccine issues - all this kind of stuff. Or you've seen them go the direction of Dunn and we recently saw, in a vote against same-sex marriage in Congress with Jaime Herrera Beutler, that they're voting against those things. And it's absolutely in opposition to a majority of Washington residents by every public poll that has been done. And so it's just interesting to see how that dynamic has played out throughout that. Again, it should be Schrier and we'll see who her opponent is gonna be, but that's gonna be a race to continue to pay attention to throughout the general election. So there's - you talk about a lot dealing with the 9th CD - there's a lot of legislative districts in the 9th CD - some of them very big battleground districts. And before we get into talking just a little bit about the legislative candidates, I did want to talk about an issue that The Stranger covered, that Axios covered this past week - and it has been the escalating incidences of harassment and violence against Black candidates, some of which are in the most competitive races in the state that we've been seeing lately. There have been lots of incidences that have been reported on that we know of throughout the state of Black candidates having their signs and property defaced - that's happened to a number of them, having their staffs harassed, followed, threatened from people in the community - and we saw that happen last week, one week before last now. And then that same week a candidate in the 30th Legislative District, which is Federal Way, Algona area, was shot twice with a BB gun. And when you're getting shot by BB gun, you don't actually know necessarily that it's a BB gun - and so you just know that you're getting shot at. Very scary situation and with those, certainly, I know that candidate Pastor Carey Anderson feels like that seems like a down payment on more violence, that seems like a type of harassment and targeting that's like - we are coming after you, we're harassing you. It's just very, very scary. And so throughout this process - and again, we saw these instances in 2020, we're now in 2022 seeing them - these campaigns have had to make considerations adjust their field plans and their canvassing plans in ways that soak up more resources, soak up more money and time, and it's just worrisome to be doing this. And realistically, this has been - continues to be a systemic problem. And so as I shared before, a number of people have - the parties should have an impact in fixing this. And specifically, I don't know if you're - I know you are - but people that are listening - the campaign apparatus when it comes to a state party - there's a state party. They do the Coordinated Campaign, which is the volunteer arm for a lot of the candidates in the state, they do a lot of supportive canvassing, phone calls, especially for - from the top of the ticket in the state on down. So Patty Murray being at the top of the ticket this year to candidates, especially in battleground areas. But the entities that are most responsible for dealing with campaigns are the House Democratic Caucus and the Washington Senate Democratic Caucus - that the House caucus and the Senate caucus are actually very frequently in contact with campaigns. They exist solely to support the political campaigns of their members. And so they provide information, guidance, infrastructure for the most competitive races against the opposing party. They're actively involved in these races and they basically act like co-consultants and adjunct staff for these. So there is a very close relationship and those are the two entities - House caucus for House candidates, Senate caucus for the Senate candidates - who are already doing that work in general. And so it has not escaped a lot of people's notice that this has been, as I was quoted saying, a glaring omission in what they've talked about. And it's not the first time the party has heard about this or confronted it. There have been conversations about this before. They've not resulted in action up until now. And so that article was particularly troubling to me. And this situation is particularly troubling to me because although everybody was asleep before then, we've seen the State Party basically say - yeah, we do have a responsibility to handle this and to try and work on a solution. We've seen the Senate caucus say - yeah, we do and we're working on a solution. And we have not seen that from House caucus leadership. And it was - we don't see this often for anything in any issue, but you had three candidates, two of them members in some of the most competitive races in the state saying - Hey, this happened. April Berg - this happened to me earlier this year and I asked the House caucus for help, I didn't get any - and now we're sitting here asking again and we're waiting. And Jamila Taylor, the head of the Legislative Black Caucus, saying essentially the same thing - we're waiting for help, we're asking, we're waiting. And then Pastor Carey Anderson, candidate in the 30th, saying we asked and we haven't - and these candidates are feeling like they're left alone and being left high and dry. And their campaigns are wondering - is it safe to be out there - and to not even have the caucus back them up like that is really something. And if Black lives do matter in this state, then we gotta do a better job of showing it, starting with these candidates. And this is - attacks on these candidates are really foundational - saying, we don't think you deserve a voice in this society, in our democracy, we're gonna try and intimidate and harass you out of it. And really, no one's really doing that much to stop it, so let's keep going. And not having support going through that is a really challenging thing. Will Casey for The Stranger also did an article on it this week. So I guess as you're looking at it, what does it look like from your vantage point? [00:20:11] Rich Smith: Yeah - well, in their defense the HCCC - or whatever, I don't know what they call it - just found out about structural racism this year, so they're hopping on it. They're also just figuring out racism as well. We might give 'em a chance to catch up. No, I was - the Rep Berg, whose canvasser was one of the people who got yelled at by a white guy who slammed his bike to the ground and did the "get off my lawn" racism up in Mill Creek, I wanna say, I can't remember where it was. But anyway, she and Rep Taylor pointed out that this - if you want to expand the number of people into your party, you want to have a big umbrella, if you want to diversify your party, which has been white for a very long time - then you're gonna want to provide some protection for people. You're gonna at least want to get a phone tree - set up some kind of protocol so that the party knows when this stuff happens and can act accordingly. The fact that we didn't have one means that we didn't prioritize it. And the fact that they didn't prioritize it means that there's not enough people in high places who are thinking about this stuff. And the fact that this has to come from the candidates who are not, who are running to be part of the party, is inexcusable because we've known that this has been happening for a long time. So yeah. It hurts recruitment for that party and it's inexcusable that they haven't done anything - they haven't done anything about it until now. [00:22:05] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and even then until now - we're waiting, we're waiting. [00:22:09] Rich Smith: Yeah. [00:22:09] Crystal Fincher: We're waiting to see - [00:22:10] Rich Smith: Did the Senate put out some recommendations, but the House hasn't? [00:22:13] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. [00:22:14] Rich Smith: Okay, I see. [00:22:16] Crystal Fincher: And as well as the State Party - they've worked in conjunction. So it'll - we're waiting to see - I hope that we see more action, but it has certainly been disconcerting, worrisome. Frankly, infuriating - [00:22:31] Rich Smith: Pramila's getting yelled at. [00:22:32] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and beyond yelled at - life threatened by dude outside of her house with a gun - telling her to go back where she came from and threatening to kill her. It's - and we saw an organizer this past week with a continued campaign of harassment from someone who already has a restraining order against them for this. It's just a worrisome time and it's gonna take everybody engaging, especially white people, to get this to stop. Relying on the victims of harassment and the victims of assault and the victims of stalking to be able to engage and solve their whole problem, when a lot of their energy is spent just trying to keep themselves safe, is not realistic and not what we can count on in order for it to change. But also, in other news - so south King County has got a lot of races. There haven't been many that have been covered. The Stranger has covered them and even engaged in a recent endorsement in one of the most competitive legislative districts in the state, which is the 47th Legislative District. And so there is one incumbent in the House seat running - Debra Entenman in that seat. And then there is a competitive Senate race and a competitive House race, both of which have open seats. And interestingly, both are D vs R races, where we're in a pretty competitive D primary, not so competitive R primaries. Well-funded Republican opponents - both of those Republican opponents are also Black, against a number of Black candidates running. So you have Shukri Olow and Chris Stearns running for one seat. You have Satwinder Kaur, who's a Kent City Councilmember currently, running against a former State Senator, Claudia Kaufman, in the other seat - running against another current Kent City Councilmember, Bill Boyce, who's a Republican. And then Carmen Goers for that other seat, who's also a Republican. So how did you - just going through that race - you made endorsements and recommendations. In that, what did you come out with? [00:24:52] Rich Smith: Yeah. In those races - yeah, first of all, the 47th is huge. It's a bellwether district. Everyone's gonna be looking at it and analyzing it on election night to figure out what it means for the general election and whether or not the Democrats are gonna be able to hold their majority in the State House and - or break even in the Senate, with Mullet as the swing - lord help us. But yeah, in the race - starting from the Senate race - that's the one that is Kaur and Kauffman vs probably Boyce - or yeah, Bill Boyce - [00:25:33] Crystal Fincher: Bill Boyce - yeah. [00:25:33] Rich Smith: Kent City Councilman. Yeah, we came down on Kauffman there, mostly because Kaur had lied to us, basically, in the course of the endorsement process. She said that - we asked about whether or not she wanted to put cops in schools and Kent, they recently - Kent School District and City Council approved recently - put cops back in the school so that they could handcuff mostly kids of color when they get out of line, and or when they say they get out of line. [00:26:13] Crystal Fincher: And a long history of that happening in the district. [00:26:15] Rich Smith: Yes, and Kaur's initial response to that was - that wasn't my, our jurisdiction, that was a decision that the school made, the school district made, yada, yada. Kauffman stepped in and said - excuse me, you voted on that. And then we were like, what? And then she's like - yeah, the City Council approved the budget that put the cops back into the schools in Kent and also, you all deliberated about it. There's a meeting - you talked about this. It was not only within your jurisdiction, but you joined a unanimous vote to put cops back in the schools. And then she's like okay - yeah, that happened. I was like - well, why did you say it didn't happen? Or why did you suggest that it was out of your jurisdiction? And so you didn't have anything to say about it? So that kind of - that didn't - that wasn't cool. We didn't like that. And we also didn't like that the vote to put the cops back in schools because, and when we questioned her on that, she said she had mixed feelings about it personally, but she voted for it because this was something the community asked for. But scratch the surface a little bit, and the community also asked for the school not to put the cops back in the schools. And so it was - she was representing people in the community, some people in the community, and dismissing - or not really dismissing - but pretending as if other people in the community didn't exist. She wanted to represent the interest of those people and not those people, so that was - otherwise they were pretty, pretty close on the issues, but her handling of that situation initially and the substance of it, I think, was what pushed us toward Kaur. We recognize that it's a moderate district, or a purple district, in a lot of ways and maybe that comes back to to haunt Kauffman, but Kaufman also just had a really forthright, blunt, straightforward way of talking. She held her ground, said what she said. And we were like - that's, there we go. There was just less triangulation, it felt like, happening. And so those were the things that pushed us there. Olow and Stearns was also really tough for us - because love Stearns' work on Treatment First Washington and his history with - him foregrounding treatment and wanting to get in - we really, would be great to have a champion in there, someone to join Rep Lauren Davis on her crusade to try to squeeze something out of that body to build a treatment infrastructure in the first place and a recovery infrastructure at the state level. I'm sure Stearns would've done that. [00:29:07] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, full disclosure - I was also part of that coalition - appreciate his work on that, definitely believed in that. [00:29:14] Rich Smith: Well, and he had been elected to Auburn City Council. And so he has a constituency he can tap - he's familiar. Olow though - we endorsed her against Upthegrove when she ran for County Council and she aligned with everything that Stearns was saying, or agreed with everything that Stearns was saying, and just has a lot of expertise in youth development and education and that's something where we need as many of those champions in the Legislature as humanly possible. And she had just had a - it looked like at the time when we were making the endorsement - just a better campaign infrastructure and so probably would've done, we thought would've done the best, will do the best against the Republican challenger. [00:30:11] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, really well-funded Republican challenger. Yeah. [00:30:15] Rich Smith: So that's what went into our thinking in those races. [00:30:18] Crystal Fincher: Yeah - no, made sense. Shukri has been doing work for the Best Starts for Kids program, which is very big in the district. Got her doctorate in education after starting out as a girl in public housing in the district. Has just - she really is someone who knows the district really well - grew up there, has certainly given back a lot, and so - know them both, appreciate them both. And just know that in both of those races, it's gonna be really tough for the Democrat vs the Republican. So whichever way that goes through, I hope listeners continue to pay attention and engage in those 'cause it's going to take help from folks who don't live there to make sure that the Democrat does get across the finish line. 'Cause, man - lots of these - Republicans are trying extra hard to put a moderate face on themselves, whether it's the 5th District talking about their bipartisan support and they're moderate and they're socially progressive and fiscally responsible - is how they're trying to present it. Whether it's in Emily Randall's district, or in the 5th district against Lisa Callan in that area. And it's just - we've got a lot at stake on this ballot. And so I really - and it's not inconceivable that Democrats could lose the majority here. With hard work, hopefully not, but it is within the realm of possibility and Republicans are looking to move backwards a lot of policy and are saying some really alarming things on the campaign trail with every - and it's not rhetoric. They're intending to move forward with repealing all of the rights that are in danger at the national level, and really being in alignment with what's happening there. And so things could go the other direction really fast. [00:32:17] Rich Smith: It's scary. It's also - is it within the 9th Congressional District as well? [00:32:21] Crystal Fincher: Yep. I think it's split between the 8th and the 9th, actually. I need to double check that post-redistricting, which is another thing - when you talk about just the 47th district, everything about everything in that race is just nonstandard. We don't know how this district, as this is the first time that we're gonna be voting within these new boundaries - so how it actually performs. You've got an interesting composition of people who - some have been on ballots plenty of times there, some haven't, some have but have been unopposed so people don't really pay attention to it. You've got two Black Republicans who are leading and the standard bearers - they're trying to portray themselves as - one of them, Bill Boyce, sent out this mailer of him and Martin Luther King. And there's nothing Republicans love more than throwing out a Martin Luther King quote that he would've thrown back in their face. But anyway, talking about that - which was, I know a lot of Black people in the Kent community looked, gave a side eye to that one really hard. But it'll be really interesting to see. And then there's a chunk of races in Seattle that are these D vs D races that are not gonna be key to the composition of the caucus and the majority, but that may help define what the agenda is in the Legislature and what's able to pass, especially when we talk about issues like progressive revenue and some very basic things that people are trying to tick off - in the healthcare realm, in the climate action realm, whole transportation package, what that kind of would look like. And so just a variety of races across the City that people will be voting on. Make sure to get that ballot in by Tuesday, either in the drop box or in the mail - you don't have to use a stamp on the envelope. But I guess as you're looking there, I see a lot of people - there's been a lot of coverage of the 46th, which full disclosure - I am working with Melissa Taylor on. In the 36th, a crowded race. There's an open seat in the 34th which hasn't quite gotten as much attention, I don't think, as the other two races. What do you see in that race? [00:34:52] Rich Smith: In the 34th? Great sadness and because it was - they're both really good. If you're - you're talking about the Leah Griffin and the Emily Alvarado - [00:35:03] Crystal Fincher: Yes. [00:35:03] Rich Smith: Yeah - what are you, what am I, how - we were all, we talked about this for 45 minutes, an hour. Okay, so our choices in this are somebody who is - we're in a housing crisis and Emily Alvarado ran Office of Housing, is - clearly knows what she's talking about. That's exactly what she wants to do when she gets to the State Legislature, and exactly how to do it, and exactly the coalition she wants to build - Latina and is - voted for Bernie Sanders - and is also impressive candidate who knows her sh*t. Speaking of, Leah Griffin - tremendous - tremendously overcame personal tragedy and didn't just keep that to herself, but used it in part as a catalyst to make real change to help everybody, contacted everybody in the Legislature and Congress - even Patty Murray - and got some responses and helped push an idea that eventually became legislation that got slipped into the Violence Against Women Act that would increase access to more sexual assault kits. So this is a person who has done tremendous work from her couch in Seattle, as she'll say. And so yeah - the choice there is between somebody who is gonna be a strong - and she's up on the news about criminal justice and is in the intersection there between how do we - what's the best way to get fewer rapes - to stop people from rape. She's a really good person who knows the answer to that question and can push for that kind of change in the 34th. And yeah, the question facing voters is - do you want somebody who's an expert on housing and is gonna do all the right things on housing and lead there and join a housing coalition in the House, which we desperately need. Or do you want somebody who is going to lead on the intersection of criminal justice and protecting survivors in the House, which we also desperately need, which is also - it's an impossible decision. I don't - we came down, the group came down at the end on Emily because of the housing crisis, but that's how I feel about that. We were all - could have gone either way. [00:37:46] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, it is - it's rough. And there's a lot of rough choices actually in Seattle - these are two great candidates. It's been tougher than prior years in some, where there were more clear choices in a lot of them. In City races, there's more differentiation between, at least among all the candidates a lot of times. And there just are some really hard choices and people across the board that - even if they don't make it through, you really, really, really hope that they continue to be involved and they step up to lead in different areas and really consider continuing to seek leadership. Because both people in this race, people in a number of races - there are some really, really exciting people who are running. You can only choose one. And so we'll see what continues to go through. And we can only choose one, we're gonna run a general election - ultimately there will be one who prevails, but yeah, it, this - I could definitely see that being a hard choice. [00:38:54] Rich Smith: If anybody wants to start some GoFundMe to help move some of these candidates around, would love somebody to move up to Shoreline and challenge Salomon, Jesse Salomon, up there - be a Senator. And could - someone could have jumped into the 46th Senate race too - would've been nice. A guy, Matt Gross, did - got a housing focus, that's great. Didn't do it for us even though - just 'cause his ideas were half baked - would've been nice to have a challenge up, a serious challenger to Javier Valdez too. Valdez is a nice guy, but there's a lot of room for improvement up there. Yeah, there was a lot of races where - would've been cool to see stronger challengers, progressive challengers. And then there were a lot of other races, and then the rest of the races were - oh, look, these people are great. Four great people running for one open seat. What are we gonna do here? So yeah, that - it was tough. [00:39:57] Crystal Fincher: Yeah - and with that, obviously, there's a ton of people who live in Seattle. And so there's going to be more people competing for what wind up being fewer positions. And you see a lot more engagement and attention being paid and candidates for those open seats. And it's - we are still contending with the disparity in resources between those in kind of safe D - Democrats are going to be elected in all of these positions. And seeing a stark difference in spending and donations for other races in the state that could go either way. And it's challenging. Again, I generally don't work with candidates. I'm working with one this year and it's a high - there are three of the top fundraisers in the state. I literally think the top three on the Democratic side non-incumbents in that race - there's a lot of money there. There doesn't need to be that much money in there, but given the composition - just like with Congress, right - especially the representatives basically have to spend all of their time fundraising. And while we desperately need more campaign finance reform, it should not take that. And a system that requires that is a broken system and you're making people make a lot of tough choices. The barrier for people being able to get in these races is challenging, 'cause you have to have enough time to devote to the fundraising and to talking to voters and the other stuff. And it's really hard to do without resources. And even if you don't have the most, you still have to have a substantial amount no matter how you look at it. So I do think there is a glaring need for some really foundational statewide campaign finance reform - also at the federal level - but Democracy Vouchers, does it solve every single problem related to everything? No. But I think it does make things more accessible, forces people to talk to more residents to get the - even if it's just in search of vouchers - hey, it's putting you in contact with more people that you have to directly deal with, which I think is always a good thing for candidates. But it's a problem, it's a challenge. And so many resources are dedicated to Seattle in the political sphere when there are so many needs for lesser-known races throughout the state. How do you see that? [00:42:39] Rich Smith: I agree. I don't know if - I don't know about Democracy Vouchers as a solution, but campaign finance reform for statewide races is great. Yeah - Melissa Taylor's raised what - $200,000 or something almost in that race - like the top, some of the top - [00:42:55] Crystal Fincher: Well, and she's the number two - [00:42:56] Rich Smith: She's the number two. [00:42:58] Crystal Fincher: - behind Lelach. And then, Nancy Connolly is also - there's a lot - now, Melissa doesn't accept corporate donations or anything, but still that's a lot of work, it's a lot of time. And not everybody has the ability to do that and that should not be a requirement of running for office. [00:43:23] Rich Smith: No. Yeah, I agree. And yeah, that's - it's as much as Stephanie Gallardo has raised against - for one House seat. Yeah, than for one US House seat, but yeah - it's crazy, it's a huge high barrier to entry, and we should do something to change it. [00:43:43] Crystal Fincher: We should. So I guess if you are - lots of resources, will link all of this in the comments of the show. As we do that - for just races across the state that may not be on people's radar, the Congressional races - is there anything that you would throw out there for people to consider that's not getting much attention right now? [00:44:05] Rich Smith: Yeah. You wanna do something over the weekend? You might try knocking doors for Emily Randall up in Kitsap - in Bremerton, Gig Harbor area - she's facing off against the Legislature's biggest brat, as Will Casey called him in a piece on the 26th Legislative District there. That's another one of those important races - Randall won by 108 votes or something last time she ran. So it's gonna be a close one. It would be great to have a pro-choice Democrat rather than a Trumpian weirdo in the Senate up there. [00:44:37] Crystal Fincher: Super Trumpian - he is one of the most extreme Republicans in the state, currently a House member running for the Senate seat to challenge her. They tried to put what they felt was one of their best, most resourced people on their side against her and she needs everybody's help. That is absolutely a race for people in Seattle to adopt and do something to help emily win. [00:45:03] Rich Smith: Yeah. If you wanna - if you're closer to the South End, you might try going down to the 30th LD - helping out Jamila Taylor with her race, figuring out what to do with, or helping Claire Wilson in her race. She'll - maybe save those for the general 'cause they'll probably get through. There's some sh*t going down in the 30th as well - is that also the one where Chris Vance is taking on Phil Fortunato - [00:45:29] Crystal Fincher: That's the 31st. [00:45:30] Rich Smith: 31st - that's right. That's just outside - [00:45:32] Crystal Fincher: So like Enumclaw, just to the east. Yep. [00:45:35] Rich Smith: Yeah, just outside. Yeah - so that's gonna be funny - I don't know, it'll be interesting. Phil Fortunato is a freak and a climate arsonist and a genuine weirdo. And I don't know if we're placing him with a centrist Republican, I guess, if Chris Vance is - will be much of an improvement, but it will be interesting to see the extent to which Trump base is being activated in these races in Washington, or whether there's some kind of independent, high Republican sh*t movement going on in the suburbs that really wants to moderate the Trumpers. So that'll be one area where I'm looking looking at that and yeah, but those would be two races that I would highly - [00:46:33] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, no, that absolutely makes sense. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you everyone for listening - this is Friday, July 29th, 2022. Thanks for listening to Hacks & Wonks - the producer is Lisl Stadler and assistant producer is Shannon Cheng with assistance from Bryce Cannatelli. Our wonderful co-host today is the Associate Editor of The Stranger, Rich Smith. You can find Rich on Twitter at @richsssmith. You can find me on Twitter at @finchfrii. Now you can follow Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Our revamped website has access to all the shows - all of the transcripts to everything is all included, and the forums that we did in the 36th and 37th are also included there. While you're there, if you like - hop on and can leave us a review on something, please do. It helps us out. You can also just get everything and we'll include all the resources and articles we talked about today in the show notes. So thanks for talking with us today. Thanks for tuning in - we'll talk to you next time.

All music used with permission by Cleveland State University Jazz Faculty   Blues for LA - Frizzel Alone Together - Schwartz/Deitz Hottentot - Scofield Dienda - Marsalis TNJNT - Perrine Pungee - Neville/Modeliste/Nocentelli/Porter, Jr.   Northeast Ohio features a number of educational institutions that offer robust jazz programs, including Oberlin College, Tri-C, Kent State University and Cleveland State University. This week, members of the Cleveland State University Jazz Faculty get together to collaborate on original compositions and generally just jam. We've featured all four performers in their own groups previously, but this week it's a change to hear four educators and band leaders collaborate.  Featuring Dan Bruce on Guitar, Chris Vance on Bass, Bill Ransom on Drums and John Perrine on Saxophones, from January 21st, 2022 it's the Cleveland State University Jazz Faculty – Live at the Bop Stop. This program is recorded at the Robert Conrad Studios at the Bop Stop in Cleveland, Ohio with additional production by Graham Rosen and editing for WOBC and WNPA provided by Dr. Pete Naegele and for our podcast and other affiliates by Shawn Gilbert and Carsen Gilbert at GilAzar media.   The Executive Producer is Daniel Peck.  For extended version of all our shows –our Live at The Bop Stop podcast can be found on your favorite podcast app.  Want to Support The Bop Stop?  Donate here! Contact us here

What's Trending: Pierce County deputies were shot in Spanaway, WA AG's office forcing boosters on staff to return to the office, and Psaki's pre-defense. Erik Christianson is a King County Metro bus driver. He says the county isn't taking seriously the complaints about open drug use on the buses. Chris Vance is going to challenge Sen. Phil Fortunato. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All music is used with permission from Chris Vance and Bobby Ferraza. Track listing Like Someone In Love - Farmer/Evans If I Were a Bell - Loesser Receipt, Please - Carter Solar - Wayne/Davis Goodbye Pork Pie Hat - Mingus Lovely and Bubbly - Ferraza Chris Vance and Bobby Ferraza come from very different musical backgrounds – but performed on stage as a duo in an intimate show this May. Chris Vance carries his bass with him globally playing with orchestras from Buffalo to Bermuda. Cleveland native Bobby Ferraza regularly plays in backing bands for acts as diverse as Benny Golson – Clark Terry and Billy Hart. From a May 26th, 2021 show in front of a live audience here are Chris Vance and Bobby Ferraza – Live at The Bop Stop. This program is recorded at the Robert Conrad Studios at the Bop Stop in Cleveland, Ohio with additional production by Graham Rosen and editing for WOBC and WNPA provided by Dr. Pete Naegele and for our podcast and other affiliates by Shawn Gilbert and Carsen Gilbert at GilAzar media.   The Executive Producer is Daniel Peck. For extended version of all our shows –our Live at The Bop Stop podcast can be found on your favorite podcast app.   Want to Support The Bop Stop?  Donate here! Contact us here  

Political veteran Chris Vance joins host Geoff Kabaservice to offer some insight into his time in the Washington state Republican Party - how they won elections on a local level, what role moderate ideas played in winning elections, and how everything changed once Trump became the Republican nominee for President in 2016. Concerned by the ideological trends in the party and the demand that no Republican criticize Trump, Vance has become an advocate for third party. He explains why the party seemingly changed so quickly with the nomination of Trump, and why he does not believe that moderate Republicans can continue in either the Republican or Democratic parties. As for the big question, "Is a third party viable," Vance believes that it is.

Welcome to the Inaugural episode of Polite Company! Donald Trump may no longer be President, but Trumpism is still a vital force in the Republican Party.  Several state and local parties have censured the seventeen representatives and Senators who vote to either impeach the former President or convict him.  More and more rank and file Republicans are leaving the party in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol as the party becomes more and more a home for conspiracy mongers and authoritarians. Is it time for a new center-right party to replace the Republicans?  Over 100 conservatives met in early February to discuss the possibility and there was strong support.  But can a new party arise when third parties are so hard to sustain in America? Would it have an impact? Dennis discusses the drawbacks, and why this might be a chance that must be taken for the sake of the nation. Questions? EMail at denminn@gmail.com Articles for background: To Hell with Duverger's Law by Dennis Sanders What Happened to America's Political Center of Gravity?, New York Times, June 26, 2019 Dozens of former Republican officials in talks to form anti-Trump third party, Reuters, February 10, 2021 The NeverTrump third party delusion, by Matthew Walther, The Week February 12, 2021 3 reasons why a 'center-right' party will never work, by Chris Cillizza, CNN February 11, 2021 ‘There's Nothing Left': Why Thousands of Republicans Are Leaving the Party, New York Times, February 10, 2021 Principle over power: Let's form a new Republican party, by Chris Vance, Seattle Times, January 13, 2021 “The central weakness of our political system right now is the Republican Party”, Vox, January 13, 2021

‘We have to make sure that the right people win elections, and that people who are willing to destroy the Constitution, never are in a position of power to actually do it.’

Welcome to The Successful Contractor Podcast, Powered by Success Group International (SGI).  A show for residential contractors about residential contractors…  We chronicle business journeys, share insights, and celebrate successes in this wonderful industry.  Thank you to our sponsors: pulseM- pulseM is the #1 Review generation platform built for Home Services. Majority of SGI members use pulseM for Google Reviews, Customer Communication through text messaging and much more. For more information please visit pulsem.me. Greensky- Greensky.  The GreenSky® Loan Program is a leader in home improvement financing. Trusted by thousands of contractors in the U.S., we provide consumer financing options to help you close more sales and grow your business. For more information, go to greenskycredit.com/sponsor/sgi Rheem. Brothers Richard and Donald Rheem founded Rheem Manufacturing Company in Emeryville, California in 1925. The company has produced a number of cutting-edge products in its 89 years of operation. Today, Rheem is North America's only manufacturer of HVAC, water heating, pool/spa heating, and commercial refrigeration solutions. For more information, go to rheem.com. The Successful Contractor Podcast is a part of the Success Group International family.  SGI is the largest, member-owned ‘best practices' organization for independent, residential-services contractors. SGI provides its members a competitive edge through proven, proprietary management tools and expertise, marketing programs, training, and group buying power, along with a highly active and eager-to-help membership. For more information about Success Group International, visit www.yoursgi.com.

With Election Day looming, it is important to ask how Donald Trump changed the GOP, if at all. Is there such a thing as “Trumpism?” Do the political and establishment elites understand why he was elected in the first place? And, does populism on the right have a future? CrossTalking with Ted Harvey and Chris Vance.

THISENT.com presents THIS Podcast Episode 27! Playground Sessions Founder and CEO Chris Vance follows his appearance in our “2020 Twenty Questions” THISENT.com Q&A series with his interview with host Mr. Joe Walker. Chris talks about his groundbreaking piano learning software, his relationship with Quincy Jones and Harry Connick Jr., and the health benefits of playing piano. Enjoy!

Do you want to learn to play an instrument? According to the CEO of Playground Sessions, 85% of people want to learn how to play music and his company can teach you how to do it for less than $20 per month.

Ross Reynolds discusses the week's new with Washington state senator Mona Das, Q13 political analyst CR Douglas, and former chair of the state GOP, Chris Vance.

Sometimes the best ideas don't come from what you know, but what you don't know. Creating a safe place to innovate and cultivate ideas is critical to the process of creating. In today's episode, Chris Vance shares the story of Playground Sessions. Prior to starting Playground Sessions, Chris didn't know how to play the piano. Instead, he used himself as a test case to see if the platform could effectively be used to learn the art of music. Then he pitched music great Quincy Jones to come and partner with them. Knowing all the answers isn't always the solution but many times it is what holds us back from starting or moving forward. In the conversation today Chris shares about his career ranging from being Brand Manager for Proctor & Gamble to working in finance for Goldman Sachs and Arthur Andersen and then becoming the Managing Director for ZAG, a brand invention company as well as being a Brand Inventor for Qui Tequila. It was at Zag that Playground Sessions was born. Throughout the conversation we chat about brand management and building, finding and building opportunities, picking good ideas, the world of startups, and creating a workplace for innovation.

Sometimes the best ideas don't come from what you know, but what you don't know. Creating a safe place to innovate and cultivate ideas is critical to the process of creating. In today's episode, Chris Vance shares the story of Playground Sessions. Prior to starting Playground Sessions, Chris didn't know how to play the piano. Instead, he used himself as a test case to see if the platform could effectively be used to learn the art of music. Then he pitched music great Quincy Jones to come and partner with them. Knowing all the answers isn't always the solution but many times it is what holds us back from starting or moving forward.In the conversation today Chris shares about his career ranging from being Brand Manager for Proctor & Gamble to working in finance for Goldman Sachs and Arthur Andersen and then becoming the Managing Director for ZAG, a brand invention company as well as being a Brand Inventor for Qui Tequila. It was at Zag that Playground Sessions was born. Throughout the conversation we chat about brand management and building, finding and building opportunities, picking good ideas, the world of startups, and creating a workplace for innovation.LinksPlayground Sessions: https://www.playgroundsessions.comYou Raise Me Up Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uKH8FfHcE4Today's episode is sponsored by SendInBlue. Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing solution that lets you create beautiful email campaigns. They are offering one month free on their premium plan to the first 100 jumbleThink Listeners who sign up. Sign Up today at http://go.thoughtleaders.io/1898220200819

n this episode I interview Chris Vance, Founder and CEO of https://www.playgroundsessions.com/ which teaches people to play the piano and who along with Quincy Jones produced the world's biggest piano recital at: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=274868297107590 where 7000 people learned "You Raise Me Up" and 925 people submitted videos and whose wakeup call was realizing that like many people he wanted to learn to play a musical instrument, but it was too difficult.

Guitarist and Savoy Brown founder Kim Simmonds joins Nancy to discuss his career journey and decades of self-discovery in the music business, his blues roots, and new album Ain’t Done Yet (1:28). And in our Entertaining Ideas segment, Nancy is joined by Chris Vance, CEO and founder of the piano instruction software and online service Playground Sessions. Find out how this online option, co-created by Quincy Jones, is bringing music instruction into homes with the help of accomplished teachers including Harry Connick, Jr. (35:14). Like and follow Entertaining Insights Facebook Page. Listen to the “All Gone Wrong” from Savoy Brown’s ‘Ain’t Done Yet’ Album. Watch “You Raise Me Up” Global Virtual Piano Recital. Visit Nancy’s website. Learn about segment sponsor the Finding Brave podcast with host Kathy Caprino (1:07, 34:54). Find out more about Kathy Caprino’s new book The Most Powerful You.

Make Learning How to Play Piano Fun and Easy for Everyone. Chris Vance is the CEO and Founder of Playground Sessions. Playground Sessions is a passionate group of musicians who believe that, with the help of technology, can share the joy of playing music with the world. Their team is dedicated to building a product that's dynamic, easy to use, and fun. And with their innovative technology and musical expertise, they hope to get you practicing and playing as effortlessly as possible.

Techstination, your destination for gadgets and gear.   I’m Fred Fishkin.        Learning to play the piano…with a little help from some legends.   Quincy Jones is a co-founder of Playground Sessions along with Chris Vance….and they have brought in Harry Connick Jr. to help to teach us all how to enjoy...

Techstination interview: Piano lessons in the digital age: Playground Sessions CEO Chris Vance

Bill Radke reviews the week's news with Chris Vance, former state Republican party chair, Brandi Kruse, correspondent for Q13 News, and Marilyn Strickland, president and CEO of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.

Bill Radke reviews the week’s news with former Democratic state representative Jessyn Farrell, Former Republican state representative Chris Vance and former Seattle mayor Mike McGinn.

Bill Radke reviews the week’s news with Chris Vance, co-chair of the Washington Independents, Erica C. Barnett, writer at "The C is For Crank," and Joni Balter, host of Civic Cocktail on the Seattle Channel.

For my 21st episode, I sat with the emcee homie Chris Vance. We rapped about his beginnings, the 30 and Over League, his new single "Legendary" featuring Brooklyn emcee Skyzoo, and how the road to recovery after a crazy injury brought him back to life.

Former Washington state GOP chairman Chris Vance and Nick Troiano, executive director of the Centrist Project argue a new centrist political movement can attract voters fed up with Democrats and Republicans. Hosting this week, political reporter Jim Brunner presses them on whether a centrist movement can really take hold in Washington state or nationally.

Today's guests include Kristen Stallman of the Oregon Department of Transportation on newest Historic Columbia River Highway segment and Washington U.S. Senate candidate Chris Vance.

This week the guys kneel before Non because they're joined by Chris Vance who plays the Kryptonian antagonist from CBS's "Supergirl!" They discuss April 18th's season finale, uncomfortable harnesses, whether Chris would rather rule the world or fly somewhere the galaxy, and more! Nick and James also get lost in the Twilight Zone with some dudebros, discuss the trailer for Marvel's Doctor Strange, and many more nerd topics!