By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Editor’s Note: This article is for informational purposes only and is not a complete compilation of the state’s Jewish candidates. The Jewish Transcript does not specifically endorse any of the candidates profiled, and this article should not be used as a voter’s guide. For more information on any of the candidates or your local races, visit your county’s Web site.
Leaves are turning, rivers are rising and the inevitable rains have returned to the Puget Sound, which can only mean that election season has come around once again. Once more, just like the apples and pumpkins, there is a fair crop of Jewish candidates inhabiting the field of candidates for public office this fall.
While this is not a complete tally, The Jewish Transcript was able to come up with seven candidates facing the voters in the coming weeks: two running for posts on suburban city councils, four incumbent or challengers for local school board seats, and one would-be county council candidate.
Mark Rose
Mark Rose, who belongs to Bet Shira in Port Townsend, is running for Jefferson County commissioner. Rose could not be reached for an interview but his background and positions on the issues facing the northwest Washington county are available on his campaign Web site, www.markrose.org.
Rose is a member of the North Olympic Peninsula Resource, Conservation & Development Council and was previously on the board of Jefferson County’s Economic Development Council, where he served as chair of its Infrastructure Committee and a delegate to the Rural Telecommunications Congress, representing Washington State.
Rose’s “10 Point Economic Development Program” calls for supporting local businesses with broadband infrastructure and resources to “embrace the new virtually based economy,” develop a Business Innovation Center in Port Townsend to hatch new business ideas. He hopes to attract local graduates to Jefferson County through mentorships and an internship program, trim the local planning processes, which he claims “waste hundreds of thousands [of dollars] a year, perhaps as much as a million” in consultant and outside legal fees, and establishing distance learning satellites in Port Hadlock, Brinnon and Quilcene and the High Tech High at Quilcene, among other proposals.
Steve Brown
Brown, the current vice-president of the Seattle school board, was profiled by the Transcript when he first stood for election four years ago. An attorney by training, he created and runs the “kidLAW” mock trial program, which has been teaching fourth through twelfth graders about law and literacy since 1995. Before that he was an active trial lawyer in Seattle for more than a dozen years. He was co-president of the Green Lake Elementary School PTA, and a board member of the Northwest Children’s Fund and Council for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.
Brown has come under fire for last year’s discovery of a $35 million shortfall in the district’s budget, dating back to the late 1990s, particularly since he chaired the board’s committees dealing with finance and auditing the budget. He explains the lapse by saying, “The board wasn’t told the truth” by district employees who provided plausible but inaccurate accounts.
In a candidate interview prior to the September primaries, Brown told the Seattle Times he would demonstrate that the budget is balanced for the last school year and the next “using a four-month verification process, and favors hiring an internal auditor to report directly to the school board.”
Brown has said he is not active within the Jewish community and does not belong to any area synagogues, but he does observe the major holidays with his family and wants to make sure his own children feel a connection to their Jewish heritage.
Nancy Waldman
Nancy Waldman says she did not grow up in a Jewish household like her husband, but she is in charge of keeping the traditions going for their own home and family.
“If I’m anything, then I’m Jewish,” she says.
Waldman, who was appointed to the Seattle School Board five-and-a-half years ago, came in second to challenger Brita Butler-Wall in the September primary election, so she knows she faces a hard battle with for her seat on the beleaguered board.
She says she is trying to find ways around the problem that local public schools “look like their communities,” meaning that Northend Seattle schools are overwhelmingly white, while the schools in the Southend are predominantly populated by children of color. She says she is also very much concerned about reducing — and ultimately eliminating — the “achievement gap” separating students of different races in Seattle, particularly before passing the state’s standardized 10th grade WASL tests become a mandatory requirement for earning a high school diploma.
While acknowledging that choosing a top administrator is one of the most important jobs of a school board, she defends the decision of the current board to hire Superintendent Raj Manhas after the primary results showed that the board could look very different following the November vote.
She says having a permanent superintendent in place before November was important to gear up for the Operating Levy vote in February and to prepare for contract negotiations with the Seattle Education Association (the city’s teachers’ union) later next year.
Jonathan Shuval
British born and educated Jonathan Shuval is standing for a seat on the Bellevue School Board, because “this is part of my responsibility as a human being, to get involved in this community,” he says.
In his native England, Shuval says, he felt their highly structured system “was overwhelming the purpose.”
“I got to be very enthusiastic about the American approach in celebrating an individual’s character and personality. America has this thing of wanting the kids to be involved with other activities, whether it be sports or community involvement, and I always thought that was absolutely excellent,” he says. “I’ve been more and more concerned over the years by simple questions like, ‘What’s a school for?’ and ‘What does it mean to be a successful school?’”
Shuval says that using standard metrics such as grades and the percentages of students that go on to college are reasonable ways to judge, but that he has wondered whether that is the only goal or even the best one.
“As Jews we talk of tikkun olam, of repairing the world, and the sages say that ‘on three pillars the Universe stands — Torah, on work, and on doing good deeds,’ and strangely there’s no emphasis there in what our sages say in academic performance. Academic performance comes about among the Jewish community because it is seen as part of the road, but only part,” he says. “To be a good person, to be a mensch, is a thing to be revered in Judaism.”
Shuval says he is “under no illusion” that his views will be popular on the board if he is elected, but he feels that it is time that someone raised the issues, even if they get voted down, four-to-one.
Lisa Strauch Eggers
Lisa Strauch Eggers is seeking seat on the Mercer Island school board. In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that she sits on the Board of Directors of this newspaper. However, Eggers neither asked for, nor was given access to, this article prior to its publication and she did nothing to influence the paper’s coverage. She was contacted and treated in the same way as all other candidates being profiled.
In her mid-40s, Eggers is a corporate lawyer and the mother of three sons, Sam, 8, Ben, 10, and Lucas, 12. In addition to her participation on the Transcript board, she works with the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, is a member of Mercer Island School District’s planning committees, and volunteers in the classroom and with the chess club.
“There are several reasons why I decided to [run for the board]. I have a real passion for public education. Second, it’s a real critical time in our district. We have a new superintendent, who I think has great leadership skills and a lot of excellent experience in handling the kinds of issues that confront our district, so I thought this was an important time to run, to assist her in her efforts.”
Eggers says she wants to do that by helping to hire “first-rate principals with proven track records for the high school and for Lakeridge Elementary,” where there are openings to be filled. Her other goal for her first year on the board is to participate in evaluating the math program throughout the schools, from kindergarten through 12th grade “because the math program really needs a hard look taken at it.”
Bob Gelb
Also on Mercer Island, Bob Gelb is hoping to be elected to the city council. Gelb says he has been on Mecrer Island since moving up to the Puget Sound area in 1993, then working for the “now-defunct Jay Jacobs.” Today he works as a product buyer with Nordstrom.
“It has never been an ambition of mine to be in politics, but both my wife and I are very involved, as volunteers — we volunteer our time with charities and Boys and Girls Clubs, and Youth and family Services,” among others.
“The city is spending a little over $13 million on a new community center that, as I go door-to-door, most of the population doesn’t want, and it’s basically using all the reserves that the city has.”
He says he believes the current council has not been listening to the will of the people on that and other matters, and they have done a poor job of planning for the future of what he calls “ a wonderful place to live.”
“Property values keep going up, it has a wonderful school system, wonderful police department and fire department,” says Gelb, “ but the cost of running the police department and fire department has been going up at the rate of four percent a year, and pretty soon we will not be able to afford to run them the way we have in the past.”
He says he feels that generally the city council has done a good job, but that they could benefit from an infusion of “new blood.”
Sonny Putter
Veteran Newcastle City Council member Sonny Putter is running to retain the seat he has held since the city’s formation in 1994. A resident of the area since 1991, Putter was described by the King County Journal (then the Journal American) as “one of the two salesmen for incorporation” of the new city between Bellevue and Issaquah when it was proposed.
“I’ve been involved with the Jewish community here since 1974, so getting roped into getting engaged with the local community was somewhat natural,” Putter told the Transcript in an interview in 2000. “Everything I’ve learned about group process, everything I’ve learned about how to be on a committee, I learned in the Jewish community.”
Putter says his main concern at this time is the long-term economic viability of the small city. Within next four years, Newcastle will not be able to sustain itself with new residential growth, he believes.
He wants the city to begin investing now in developing a central business district that will contribute business property taxes and sales tax revenues to avoid an upward pressure on residential tax rates.
Putter is also pressing for Newcastle to get its own ZIP code designation. Currently, he says, Newcastle is listed by the Postal Service as part of Renton. Companies filing business and sales tax reports list the place of business as Renton, he says, and Newcastle does not get its full share of the revenues.