Dori Monson: I have never seen a bigger clown show in Seattle politics
Jun 25, 2014, 1:18 PM | Updated: 2:27 pm
(KIRO Radio/file)
Taken from Wednesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.
It’s been kind of a joke what’s been going on with Seattle City Light, but the joking is over now.
What we have is what appears to be almost criminal misconduct by the people running Seattle City Light, the mayor’s office, the city council, and all the people who should be overseeing Seattle City Light.
I find it offensive on behalf of all taxpayers in this region that the highest paid city employee gets a $120,000 raise so he can be, by far, the highest paid. And the more we’ve found out about Seattle City Light CEO Jorge Carrasco, the more this is called into question.
The Seattle Times broke a story last week, that Seattle City Light hired a company called Brand.com to sanitize Carrasco’s search results on Google, so that only positive stories would appear about him.
They have reportedly paid $17,500 to Brand.com to boost Carrasco’s online profile. One of the things that Brand.com did is they had writers, and I use that description very loosely, but they had writers write these flattering puff pieces about the CEO and then they would get them boosted way up in the Google search.
Danny Westneat, with The Seattle Times, posted a couple of sentences from the stories written by Brand.com about Jorge Carrasco. They are almost incomprehensible.
“Another unique option offered by Seattle City Light, and will hopefully continue to spread across the United States, is Green Up,” said one line.
My daughters could all write better than that when they were in third grade. As Westneat says, it’s gibberish. Today, they had a follow-up story. Seattle City Light now wants a refund from Brand.com. They’re asking for their money back.
There’s a quote in The Seattle Times from Jorge Carrasco’s chief of staff, Sephir Hamilton, and he said of Brand.com:
“This didn’t deliver the results we intended. I would not recommend this service to anyone.”
If your standard as to why you should get your money back is because Brand.com didn’t deliver the results we intended, how about you and your boss Jorge Carrasco give the taxpayers our money back? You guys aren’t delivering the results that we intended when we paid Jorge Carrasco $360,000 a year. If you guys were doing your job, you’d be generating plenty of positive press on your own and you wouldn’t need companies like this. You guys aren’t doing your job at Seattle City Light.
Ed Murray, who had the audacity to tell us: “We are lucky to have Jorge,” should give us back his salary because he’s not overseeing what’s going on at Seattle City Light. The city council, that near-unanimously approved this pay hike for Jorge Carrasco, they’re not doing their job.
So yeah, go ahead and get our money back from Brand.com, but while you’re at it, give us back the money you guys are earning because you’re ripping off the public right now with marketing schemes and phony journalists to bump you up in the search results.
This was a big joke a couple of days ago. The joke is over now. You guys are absolute clowns as stewards of our money and nobody is holding you accountable. This is a clown show.
I’ve been a pretty staunch watchdog of a lot of aspects of Seattle politics. I have never seen a clown show like we have right now running things in the city, between the Socialist, and the $15 an hour, and the mayor pushing for a massive pay hike for a guy who has to hire a branding company to help his image. This is unbelievable what is going on here.
Taken from Wednesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.
JS