Politicians tweet, and people are following

Published 10:40 pm Sunday, May 23, 2010

EDMONDS — Did your electricity go out during the March windstorm, leaving you to wonder when it would come back on?

Here’s what Mayor Gary Haakenson had to say about it in his March 16 Twitter post: “The city’s facilities manager reports that PUD has estimated power back on within the hour.”

When gray whales were seen off the Edmonds shoreline the same month, giddy Twitter users posted links to their photographs.

Haakenson, an avid photographer, says he’d been dying to photograph a whale but kept coming up short.

So he did the next best thing: took a photograph of a sign with an image of a whale on it and posted a link on Twitter.

“It was a little tongue-in-cheek,” he said.

The following month, he photographed some real whales and posted a link to the photos on Twitter, a social networking site that beginning in 2006 popularized microblogging. It’s a twist on blogging in which users post messages of up to 140 characters to their subscribers, known as “followers.”

Haakenson opened his Twitter account, which goes by the name edmondsmayor, in late May 2009. He now has 217 followers.

At first, he says, “I thought it would be an easy way to contact city employees in case of an emergency.”

Thinking about it more, Haakenson says he decided to expand his use of the account to act as a sort of city information update service.

“I probably only use it once or twice a week,” he says.

Haakenson, who’s in the last year of his third consecutive term, says he avoids delving into politics, focusing instead on events he thinks “would be of interest to people.”

In some cases he likes to engage followers, as he did Friday: “Although gambling isn’t allowed in Edmonds, does anyone want to start a pool on when the first bear sighting in Edmonds will be this spring?”

In other cases, he touches on city-related business, such as with this post from July 17, 2009 alluding to a controversial property owner’s proposal to exceed the city’s height limits near the waterfront.

“Edmonds code has a 25-foot building height limit! Today we received a contract rezone application for a project with buildings to 75 feet!” he tweeted.

The city doesn’t have a specific policy on how and when elected officials — or employees — can use social networking sites, said city attorney Scott Snyder.

For elected officials, use of social media sites like Twitter or Facebook can sometimes lead to problems.

Last June, for example, Mukilteo City Councilwoman Jennifer Gregerson’s Tweet alerting her followers that some council members would be “debriefing” at Ivar’s restaurant following a long hearing about Mukilteo’s controversial annexation proposal raised questions about how the city conducts its business. She later said that city business wasn’t being discussed.

More recently, a blogger with a Seattle-based political website requested records of text messages made between Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and a councilman.

“There certainly is an electronic trail of stuff that could embarrass you in public,” Snyder says.

Gregerson says council members didn’t discuss city business at Ivar’s. In retrospect, she says she probably shouldn’t have written the word “debriefing” in her Twitter post.

Edmonds City Councilman D.J. Wilson says he supports Haakenson’s use of Twitter.

“It’s great,” he says. “Anytime an elected official can use a different vehicle with the public to communicate, it’s a good thing.”

Use of social media allows Haakenson, who pens columns for the weekly papers the Edmonds Beacon and The Enterprise, to reach readers who might never look at a newspaper, Wilson says.

“Really, it’s just one more way to communicate with people,” he says.

Bigger questions on access to public records loom in the future, to be decided by the courts, he says.

In a world where technology is changing the way people communicate, “What constitutes a public record?” Wilson asks. “As a public official, if I or Gary (Haakenson) tweet about something, when does it become a public record?”

For his part, Haakenson believes it’s simplest to be noncontroversial.

“Where you run into problems,” he says, “is when you start dragging politics into whatever you’re posting.”

Oscar Halpert: 425-339-3429; ohalpert@heraldnet.com

Tweeting in Snohomish County

Here are some officials in the county who have Twitter accounts and tweet about public business. Find them by searching for their user names.

Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon — Aaron_Reardon

Snohomish County Councilman Dave Somers — somersdave

Edmonds Mayor Gary Haakenson — edmondsmayor

State Rep. Mike Hope, R-Lake Stevens — repmikehope

State Rep. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds — MarkoLiias

Mukilteo Councilwoman Jennifer Gregerson — Counciljen