Matt Batcheldor/The Olympian

Voters could decide whether Olympia's controversial pedestrian interference ordinance remains law if an Olympia group gets its way.

A new organization calling itself the Poor Peoples Union will launch a petition drive next week to get a referendum placed on the ballot, said Rob Richards, an organizer of the group and coordinator of the Bread and Roses Advocacy Center. "At this point we're just writing the language of the referendum and preparing packets to start gathering signatures," he said.

But it was unclear Tuesday how many signatures petitioners would need to be successful - 2,767 or 4,087 - because the city's code contradicts itself. On one hand, the code says to follow a state law that says 15 percent of registered city voters at the time of the last city election have to sign a petition for a referendum. There were 27,248 registered voters on the last city general election in 2005, said Keith Mullen, assistant manager of elections for Thurston County. So, 15 percent of that would be 4,087 signatures. That's the law for "code" cities, the classification Olympia falls under.

But Olympia's code also says to follow a state law that requires signatures from 25 percent of the people who cast a vote for mayor in the last mayoral election. The last election in 2003 saw 11,071 vote for mayor, and and 25 percent of that would mean 2,767 signatures. Those are the rules for a "commission" city, which Olympia no longer is.

City Attorney Bob Sterbank said he didn't know which requirement applied. He's not aware Olympia has ever had a referendum. "I've not been presented with this question before," he said.

Read more here.

OLYMPIA, Wash. The Evergreen State College says it is offering tuition waivers and other academic support to workers who were displaced when a coal mine closed in Centralia last month.

The TransAlta Corporation closed the mine and laid off 600 workers. Officials said the aging mine couldn't be sustained, especially with a spike in safety costs following recent landslides.The college in Olympia says tuition waivers of 300-dollars to 12-hundred dollars per quarter will be available, along with academic guidance, for mine workers who lost their jobs.

Evergreen is also working with Centralia College on an agreement that would allow students at the Centralia school who meet certain criteria to transfer credits to Evergreen.

Apparently holiday traffic has become congested in other areas too.

With the New Year coming, I'm thinking of ways to make OlyBlog even better. One long-standing issue with the present system, for example, is that OlyBlog editorial policy has been a bit of an enigma to some. In particular, some have had difficulty with the notion of a community blog, with no one person determining the content of the posts (apart from topic). I've also noticed that some people think of "Rick" and "OlyBlog" as the same thing, as if everything that I say is the Official OlyBlog Position (thanks to enpen for helping me understand this phenomenon).

So, with the goal of placing OlyBlog on a more transparent foundation, I'd like to suggest the following changes:

• Instead of having a somewhat mysterious set of moderators, I suggest that we elect a board of docents to run the blog. Docents would be responsible for tracking day-to-day activity on the blog. I'm assuming that docents would also be moderately active contributors themselves (although this wouldn't necessarily have to be the case). I think one year would be a reasonable commitment for a docent.
• Most of the content on OlyBlog is generated directly by users. However, there are other sources. One docent would receive email submissions. One docent would be in charge of monitoring each of the local lists (e.g., OMJP, TESCCRIER, etc.) for relevant content. Another would search external media (Google video, YouTube, other blogs, newspapers, etc.).
• "Rick" would come off the front page as the ultimate decision maker. Difficult calls about content or organization of the blog would be decided in most cases by agreement among the docents, in consultation with all the users.
• Docents would be listed on a sidebar on the front page, making the structure of the blog more apparent to all.

If this seems like a good plan, the first step would be to take nominations for docents. I think that there should be at least 5 positions to begin with.

Update: Nominations thus far -- Rob R., Emmett, Sarah, Norm, Jade, enpen, TFI, NWarty, Rob W., OperaGirl...