A Skansi move, other surprises in Gig Harbor mayor, council, school board races
There were surprises when filing week for Pierce County elections closed Friday.
John Skansi withdrew his candidacy for Gig Harbor mayor, which means Council Member Tracie Markley will be running for that position unopposed.
Skansi, a 61-year-old substitute teacher and former commercial fisherman, will instead run for City Council.
Unless a strong write-in candidate emerges, Markley, a first-time council member, will be the city’s next mayor. Mayor Kit Kuhn will not be seeking reelection, leaving the top spot at the city open.
Skansi had filed his intent to run earlier in the week, but withdrew his filing on Friday. This came following an investigation by The Gateway that revealed Skansi had been barred from teaching at four Seattle public schools because of problems interacting with students.
There were two other surprises. School board member Deborah Krishnadasan withdrew and endorsed another candidate. And Gig Harbor Council Member Bob Himes did not file for re-election.
In another twist, a candidate who had intended to challenge Council Member Jim Franich changed his mind and instead filed against Council Member Jeni Woock.
Here is how the November election was shaping up on Friday. Filing has closed, although candidates can still withdraw through Monday.
CITY OF GIG HARBOR
Mayor
Nonpartisan Office, 4-year term
Tracie Markley (current council member)
Tracie Markley has served as a city council member since she won the seat in 2019. A retired real estate agent and former member of the parks commission, she said upon winning that she was “ready for this.”
She is now looking to take over as mayor, where she says her priorities are to restore “trust” in city government. When she announced in February, she told The Gateway that she would do this by listening to all involved parties.
“One of the things that I am hoping to bring is some self-discipline, some civil discourse to deal with the issues that our city is facing right now,” Markley said at the time. “I’m a very, very good listener and I am able to work with all people of all different backgrounds.”
On her campaign website, she pledged to bring “true transparency” to the city in dealing with “the many complex issues.” This has been a consistent message she has emphasized back to when she announced, indicating it would be a priority of her now unopposed administration.
“If there is a problem, I don’t bury things in the dark. I drag it into the light and I want to talk about it,” Markley said. “I will listen and respect what they have to say. I feel that that is very lacking in our current administration. There is no trust, there is no respect.”
According to the Public Disclosure Commission (PDC), Markley has raised $1,200 which went towards her campaign website.
Council Position 1
Nonpartisan Office, 4-year term
Jeni Woock (Incumbent)
Scott McCarley
Robert Wiles
Incumbent council member Jeni Woock is running against Scott McCarley and Robert Wiles for this position. She was elected in 2017 after narrowly losing a race in 2015 by a margin of 13 votes.
“I lived here for 18 years and I love Gig Harbor,” Woock said at the time. “We were elected to slow down growth, to end development agreements, and we need a better plan for the community.”
Since then, Woock was an advocate of showing concern about how staff were being treated.
Most recently, she helped to push for restrictions on holiday fireworks in Gig Harbor. It passed and now only allows for them to be fired on July 4.
Attempts to reach Scott McCarley about his candidacy were unsuccessful.
Robert Wiles had originally filed to run for position 4 against Jim Franich, but refiled on Friday to run against Woock.
“After talking to a lot of people in my community and friends I trust, I guess people in my circle decided it might be a better opportunity to run against someone else,” Wiles said. “I’m not saying I have a strategy to be honest with you, I just think that maybe some of what the person in position one, some of the views from her perspective, don’t really coincide with some of mine. That as well as also hearing that someone was going to run against Jim.”
Wiles says he is a lifelong resident of Gig Harbor and has been a real estate broker for RE/MAX for the last three months. He said he has a “master command of the English language” that he believes sets him apart from other candidates.
“Being in sales for over 25 years and being in public speaking and having a lot of big companies invest in me has brought me to this point,” Wiles said. “I feel like I can have a real positive outcome on the community of Gig Harbor.”
Wiles said he hopes to find common ground and transparency in his candidacy. He said his top issues are restoring accountability to the council. “There needs to be a better, fuller understanding of projects, budgets, and things of that nature,” Wiles said. “There is no accountability and no people following through the process.”
Council Position 2
Nonpartisan Office, 4-year term
David Ozier
Roger Henderson
Jim Hagman (withdrew on Monday)
John Skansi
Council member Bob Himes, who currently holds the position, did not file to run for reelection for his now-open seat. Attempts to reach candidates David Ozier and Roger Henderson were unsuccessful. Jim Hagman, who runs Hagman Computer Services, was unavailable to talk when reached and withdrew his candidacy on Monday.
Skansi, who switched to this position after withdrawing his candidacy for mayor, was not immediately available for comment. He withdrew from the mayoral race after The Gateway revealed he had been barred from substitute teaching at four Seattle Schools. Documents of problems included allegations that Black students felt singled out in his classes, and that he allowed a teacher’s aide to conduct his classes. Skansi downplayed the concerns, calling them “frivolous, very minor things.”
Council Position 3
Nonpartisan Office, 4-year term
Jim Franich (Incumbent)
Brenda Lykins
Jim Franich is a third-generation Gig Harbor resident who has served on the council from 2000 to 2010 before winning again in 2017. He spent 13 years as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, California, and the Puget Sound.
Franich is known for taking a strict line on budgets and frequently votes in the minority on issues in the city.
Attempts to reach Brenda Lykins were unsuccessful.
Council Position 7
Nonpartisan Office, 4-year term
Seth Storset
Spencer Abersold (Incumbent)
Newcomer Seth Storset is running against current member Spencer Abersold, was elected in 2017.
Abersold was a manager of the Tides Tavern for eight years before working as a real estate agent. He has also been the station manager for Gig Harbor public radio station KGHP-FM since 2004.
Abersold said in 2017 he was focused on “unity” and listening to the community.
Seth Storset says he is a longtime resident who has lived in the area since his family moved to the area when he was in eighth grade. He is now raising his own family in Gig Harbor and “loves the city.” He currently works as the director of safety for TOTE Maritime Alaska.
Storset is also a part of the Permission To Start Dreaming Foundation, an organization founded by his mother-in-law that works to help veterans and first responders live “a fulfilled life within each of their dreams.” He is also on the Board of Directors for the Foss Waterway Seaport in Tacoma.
“I’ve always had a desire to serve,” Storset said. “I’ve been wanting to get involved with the city council. Everything has to fit right in time and I’ve worked myself up to this level to want to be more involved.”
Storset says he wants to keep the “charm” of downtown Gig Harbor while helping “govern growth in a strategic way.”
He also says he wants to build on the “tourism piece” of the city. “Gig Harbor is a destination spot and I like that. I like that when people come to Gig Harbor, they love it,” Storset said. “I think we need to have a good balance of growth.”
PENINSULA SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 401
Director District 2
Erik Johnson
David Weinberg
Jennifer Butler
Linda Ader
Incumbent Deborah Krishnadasan originally sought reelection and had even filed this week, fully intending to run. Then, on Thursday, she announced she had changed her mind.
In a Facebook post, Krishnadasan explained her decision to not run again and offered an endorsement of one of the candidates running to take her spot, Jennifer Butler.
“This week, I filed for school board director to continue to serve our district. At the time, I had not heard of anyone with my similar passion for schools intending to file. Jennifer Butler later approached me with confidence she could build upon my efforts with new energy and expertise,” Krishnadasan said. “She is prepared to step into a leadership role on the school board. With Jennifer’s filing, I am withdrawing my filing as I know my position will remain in reasonable and capable hands. Jennifer has my full support and I am excited about her passion and advocacy for education, as well as the school architecture background she will bring to the board.”
Butler has been involved in the district in a variety of capacities. She has served as vice president of the Peninsula Schools Education Foundation. She also has served as the Chairperson for Stand Up for Peninsula Schools which helped to get a bond issue passed in 2019 that would lead to the opening of several new schools in the district.
The success came after multiple years of failures, including an especially narrow loss in May of 2018 by just over one percent of the vote. Butler said she looks back on that success with pride.
“There was this massive, volunteer-led campaign in which we really reached out. I think we knocked on some crazy number like 9,000 doors,” Butler said. “Talking about the bond, I was really so inspired by the support.”
She said the support of her Krishnadasan, a colleague with whom she worked to get the bond measure passed, was a big vote of confidence.
“It meant the world to me to have her trust and support,” Butler said. “If I can do her proud and do proud by our students and community, I’ll be very aware of how big those shoes are there.”
Butler said she is also inspired by the hiring of a new superintendent, Krestin Bahr, and felt now was the right to get involved. She now sees a “bright future” where there is room for improvement when it comes to the “timeliness” of communicating with the community.
Butler is being opposed by two men who describe themselves as conservatives.
One, Erik Johnson, says he works in banking. He wouldn’t specify where, saying it was irrelevant to his campaign and that he was concerned that “cancel culture” over his views could negatively impact his employment.
Johnson says his views are centered around instituting “common sense curriculum.” That means getting rid of what he considers “Marxist ideas” and “social experiments” meant to “indoctrinate” students, he said.
“We had full on Marxist books in our district that were pushed to the grade-school kids,” Johnson said.
Asked for an example, Johnson referred to the children’s picture book A is for Activist that he said “is basically meant to target grade school kids to indoctrinate them into an ideology.”
“It’s a Marxist, communist book. That’s exactly what it is,” Johnson said. “It goes right from A to Z and every single one of them is a communist or Marxist word.”
Another candidate, software architect David Weinberg, calls himself a “right-leaning Independent” and shares in Johnson’s view that “communism” is being taught in the schools.
“I’ve got two kids from a second marriage and I’m watching what they’re teaching,” Weinberg said.
He also decried “critical race theory” being taught in schools. Critical race theory is defined as “an academic movement of civil rights scholars and activists in the United States who seek to critically examine the law as it intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice.”
Asked about what curriculum he thinks would fall under this banner, Weinberg could not name any specific curriculum being used in the district.
“I don’t have any examples and I can’t speak for that,” Weinberg said. “I’ll be honest, I don’t know all the details yet. A lot of this is based on what I’ve been told. It’s second-hand, from other people.”
Weinberg said he’s an avid listener of Jason Rantz, a radio host and conservative commentator.
Weinberg also said he had concerns about sex education being taught to students.
“The school has to come clean with exactly what they’re going to teach their kid, before it’s presented to the child,” Weinberg said.
Weinberg also said he doesn’t “want people going in and redefining ‘oh, our country was really founded in 1619,’ or something like that.” This is a reference to the New York Times 1619 Project, which aimed to bring attention to the legacy of slavery in U.S. history.
Weinberg said he wants things to stay the same.
“What we’ve been teaching has been taught for hundreds of years, you know, since this country’s birth,” Weinberg said. “There should be no politics in the school system.”
Weinberg said he hasn’t ever taught in a classroom, though did share his opinions on teachers.
“We used to have a saying and it’s true: ‘those who cannot do, teach.’ That happens a lot. A lot of people have a passion for teaching and that passion is important. If they have a passion, then they’re well suited. Then there are those that don’t have a passion, they only do it because they need a job. One of the big problems is getting rid of bad teachers. Teachers that can’t teach or they’re terrible or they only do it because they can’t do anything else.”
Butler said she disagreed with Johnson and Weinberg.
“To statements like that, I just wonder if they’ve actually spent time in the classroom, if they’ve actually volunteered in their kid’s classroom, if they’ve actually have reached out and formed relationships with their teachers and gotten to know what is going on in the classroom,” Butler said. “I could not disagree more strongly with statements like that.”
Attempts to reach candidate Linda Ader went unanswered.
Director District 5
David Olson (Incumbent)
Juanita Beard
Juanita Beard is the sole challenger to incumbent David Olson, who is currently the board president. Beard says she has been a mental health counselor for 16 years who runs her own business and that “she has a big heart for kids.” She says her priority is bringing more “diversity and equity in schools.”
Beard, who is Black, thinks her presence on the currently all-white board would be a first step toward bringing new perspectives to discussions.
“There is a lack of diversity among the board,” Beard said. “Me running will be the first step towards diversifying that.”
“Being able to have an honest conversation that the district is facing and being able to put our money where your mouth is to make sure everyone can have an equal chance at education is how I would make that happen,” Beard said.
This story was originally published May 21, 2021 at 7:02 PM.
