ANYTHING else is self-promotion????

Anything at all a person might do to protect themselves is self-promotion?

What your saying is you’ve got one chance to get things squared away once you get hosed by the city / council / planning dept… then you need to suck it up???

No, I don’t think so. Incompetant or corrupt public employees need to get pink slipped. Period.

Had you examined the dispute you’d see that no one ignored the law. We went to city employee David Barnes and verified that Cottonwoods - especially Cottonwoods that were toppled by a windstorm - were not covered by the ordinance. Then, in a cowardly move, Barnes refused to stand up an say he’d erred. Director Eric Sheilds lied in a letter to the editor re: the controversy.

People like you may not have the stones, resources or guts to see it through… others do.

And I also have a very sunny disposition, buttwipe.

John Gilday

PS: I see you are still hiding behind your pseudonym, taking potshots… very brave.

So is he part of the problem or part of the solution?

I often don’t care for his rhetoric or his approach, and I don’t always agree with his opinion, but Mr. Gilday has helped put City Hall under a microscope, and that’s a good thing. In fact, isn’t the main goal of Mr. Butcher here in Kirkland Views to do just that?

I say Bully for The Eastside Sun. It was a long time coming for this city and the august issue calling for the ouster of the mayor is a masterpiece.

I do know that the Kirkland Tree Ordinance is meant to do one thing only and thats to raise money through fines on our citizens. I learned about the danger of letting weedy trees grow too big on our lots because of an article in The Eastside Sun which I believe was written by Mr. Gilday. We hired a man to cut all 29 trees down and pull out the roots. If we hadn’t within a few years they would have been too big to remove and we could never develop the property.

We would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mr. Asher’s ignorant tree canopy law.

So keep on their backs dear Sun, we support you 110%

Waterfund is a self-financed memorial to a great woman to whom I was once engaged. She died before her time (44) and Waterfund is her legacy from me.

As a self-financed non-profit, 100% of the expenses of operation and outfitting were borne by me alone. No donations are accepted except medical professionals donating their time at the clinics, no government financing, no tax exemption.

When Waterfund’s offices were moved to a new location we asked whether Cottonwoods were under any special protection, we were told they were not. After they were cleaned up we were told we broke an ordinance and would be required to pay $6,000 and plant 36 new trees - so long as they were NOT Cottonwoods (since Kirkland considers them noxious weeds).

At first I decided it was better to sell the ambulance and keep our budget intact - that didn’t happen in a timely enough manner for The City of Kirkland, so I wrote a personal check for $6,000 and kept the ambulance for a couple more years.

Kathy O is a trusted and hardworking volunteer. Her counsel and friendship are invaluable. She never hid her association with Waterfund or me.

Lastly, please do NOT follow me anywhere. Use your own brain and come to your own conclusions. I am not a Pied Piper and you are not a rat (so far as I can tell).

If you want any advice from me it’s this:
When you attack someone or the organization they represent, have the courage to sign your REAL name. I think (the real) Will Rogers would have agreed.

signed,
John Michael Gilday

The Council will be under intense public and internal scrutiny from here on. The City has serious work to do in addressing the code issues that have emerged. I would like to see the energy and passion from this blog focused in that direction. Elections will take care of the rest.

IF there needs to be a housecleaning and IF it starts with the top dog, then start with the City Manager. In the Council-Manager form of government, the Mayor has limited additional authority as compared to the other members of Council. However, the City Manager can run the city well or, not so well. I’d like to know more about his contract and his performance reviews.

GotOut - thank you for the link to the website. Very interesting. I can’t help but wonder how a nonprofit (waterfund) can use the proceeds of the sale of a vehicle to pay a fine assessed against an individual (Gilday). Of course we cannot assume something went wrong here, just because it sounds like it could have, because we don’t know all the facts (hmmmm, sounds like good advice all around)

The link to waterfund led to a bit of googling and http://soundpolitics.com/archives/008640.html
Kudos to Butcher and Eddy for their intelligent comments about annexation (and Piper is interesting as usual). But carefully consider the postings by O’Rourke and Gilday - about the City, its planning director and a reference to a website with a name that is too vile for me to post here.

According to the website for waterfund, it lists both O’Rourke and Gilday as contacts so depending on what happened first, likely that they did not just bump into each other on the blog.

And therefore my hesitance to follow Mr Gilday’s recommendations for who should lead and who should leave.

BTW, the agenda changed before last night’s meeting and the words “or charges” were removed.