Secret Ballots and Backroom Deals: Ballard's First Council Meeting
A newly elected town council in Ballard descends into chaos and secrecy as they scramble to appoint city officials and slash municipal salaries.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
On Friday night, the new Ballard town council met as a committee of the whole to consider the applications of forty-one persons for five appointive offices and to discuss the advisability of changing the salaries of various officers. The result of the meeting was supposed to be kept secret until the next regular council meeting, but in some way, the deliberations leaked out, causing great astonishment. The balloting was informal, but it is expected to hold during the official vote on Tuesday. Charles Hadfield was tapped for city clerk, F. E. Sprague for marshal, and the current incumbent, Edmund Peters, was retained as city attorney. Andrew McCann, a candidate for clerk who lost, was offered the office of police justice as a balm for his wounded feelings, but he politely and positively declined. In a move to tighten the budget, the council raised the clerk's salary from $75 to $90 a month but slashed the marshal's pay from $100 to $65, and the night watchmen's pay from $75 to $40. Additionally, the marshal's bond requirement was hiked from $5,000 to $12,000.
“Andrew McCann, who was one of the leading candidates for the clerkship, was offered the office of police justice, presumably as a balm for his wounded feelings, but he politely and positively declines to accept the honor.”
Ballard’s early struggles with municipal governance—specifically the tension between rapid professionalization and the realities of local budget constraints—foreshadow the modern-day Seattle experience. The city's growth remains defined by this same friction: the constant, often messy, negotiation between civic ambition and the purse strings.
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