The best thing would be to come to the hearing tonight -- there will be copies available for signing in the lobby of the Washington Center from the time the doors open at 5:00 until at least the time testimony gets underway at 6:30 p.m. Or, you can drop into Anne Buck's spice shop, next door to Darby's on 5th Avenue, right across from the Capital Theater. Or you can go to this website and download your very own personal copy, sign it, maybe get a few friends, spouses, and neighbors to sign, or just sign it singly, and mail it in. Thanks!

This initiative is a bit tricky because signers have to be registered voters in the City of Olympia in order for their signatures to be valid. A lot of people who seem to live in Olympia actually live in the unincorporated county. Oddly, people whom I always assumed lived in Olympia, who live closer to downtown than I do, are actually not within the city limits. So, the Friends of the Waterfront and others involved in gathering signatures are very carefully getting extra signatures, realizing that in the validation process, some of them will be discarded. The actual number of valid signatures needed, which is 15% of the registered voters at the time of the last mayoral election, is slightly under 4000, so there's already a good buffer of more than 10%. The expectation is that there will be more than 5000 signatures on Thursday when this is delivered to the city clerk's office for validation.