Muni League keeps the lights on

With recent confirmation of its last member, an independent citizens advisory board of experts to oversee Seattle City Light was finally re-established after a hiatus of more than a year. The former advisory board had provided the roadmap for City Light's recovery from the disastrous West Coast energy crisis of 2001 and helped to forge a working consensus between the mayor and the City Council to implement that road map.

Because of those efforts, the key bond-rating agencies have upgraded City Light's credit ratings, reducing the utility's cost of long-term debt and easing the burden on ratepayers in the future.

Although the mayor and council, and certainly City Light itself, can rightly claim credit for this turnaround, a major driving force for reform and recovery at City Light has been a 97-year-old "good-government" group of concerned citizens known as the Municipal League of King County (munileague.org). Founded during the Progressive era of reform at the start of the 20th century, the Muni League continues today to work for more effective and responsive government.

It was the Muni League that weighed in with a powerful report on the failures at City Light leading to financial disaster in 2001 and that insisted that wholesale reform and new leadership, not minor tinkering, were needed at City Light. It was the Muni League that called for a review of the city's governance of the utility and supported the creation of an independent advisory board of experts to help formulate a recovery program for City Light.

It was the Muni League that supported the implementation of that recovery program and helped to defeat an ill-advised and premature attempt by some on the council to cut rates in 2004, and who most recently took on the difficult but ultimately successful effort to preserve an independent advisory board that some council members had sought to quietly kill or emasculate.

While the Muni League is best known to most of us for its independent non-partisan evaluations of candidates and ballot measures, its members are involved in a range of efforts to make government work better for all residents, from transportation to drug policy.

The Muni League is in a league of its own as it searches for workable solutions to real problems in government, with no axes to grind except better government for all of us. It is a sorely needed counter-weight to the partisan and factional politics that seem to dominate all levels of government these days and a partial antidote to the disproportionate influence on public policy of special and single-issue interest groups. The Muni League deserves our thanks and support as we face the increasingly challenging issues before us.