This morning I signed a petition to make the mayor of Federal Way a directly elected position. The guy with the signatures was at my bus stop, with a semi-captive audience as the riders of my bus, for whatever reason, always file into an orderly line. Unfortunately for the signature taker, many of them drive to the P&R from other cities.

Federal Way is poised to net about 20,000 residents in an ambitious annexation plan which will plug in 4-5 eastside neighborhoods, which the city has had its eye on for years, in one fell swoop. This plan, if those residents swallow it, will push the city’s population to 6 digits and make it the 6th largest town by population in the state.

Back east where I’m from, most cities whose politics I’m familiar with have a directly elected mayor. (Towns, distinct entities from cities, are another matter.) The mayor is the leader and figurehead of the city, and in nearly all cases doubles as head of city administration.

But in Federal Way, the city council is elected, who then picks the mayor from among its ranks, who only serves as a council chairman, leaving the real heavy lifting to an appointed city manager.

Admittedly, Federal Way has only been a city for 17 short years, was for many years just a remote residential interstate suburb with some industrial offices and a commercial highway lined with auto lots and shops. At that time, the ur-suburban model of the homey little civic-pride city council, which to this day is populated with landed business owners, probably seemed fitting.

But a city that is looking to attract business, grow to the 6th largest in the state, and position itself as the “capital of South King County” needs to adapt its governmental structure to one that befits a large city, not a small suburb. A few years ago, the Federal Way Mirror lamented the city’s lack of leaders. Having no city personalities to look to for identity and direction, the town is left a mismosh of blandness.

Would an elected mayor fix this problem? Well, it would bring potential city leaders out of the woodwork, to offer to lead the city. Instead of the perennially small pool of city councilpeople, all shoe-ins running after a piece of a pie, being the leadership, we would have people trying to stand out from each other as city visionaries.

My fear is that Federal Wayans are too complacent and unconcerned to support the elected mayor petition or even vote for the practice. Is it due to the city’s lack of community? Lack of unified vision? Lack of inclusiveness in city government? Or just the normal mentality of a city stuck in the bedroom-community mindset for too long? It’s as if the population doesn’t really want to be come the 6th largest city in the state. It’s too bad, because I don’t think a city that big can survive just by being bland and uninteresting.

On the off chance that the petition, and the resulting intiative, is successful, I can say who I’d like to see as mayor: current city manager Neal Beets, who has more personality than the city council put together.

Got a Twitter account recently, and I thought it was nifty at first, though it hasn’t quite caught on with me yet. I like the notion, or at least the term, of “microblogging”. What I could do without, though, is Twitter’s focus on “what are you doing now” rather than being generic. Some people blog about what they’re doing, I realize; but others blog about what they’re thinking. (Some even do both, even at the same time!)

Sometimes you’re at home or work and something occurs to you, a snippet of inner thought, that you might want to share, but it’s too small to devote a blog or journal post to, or too random to share with those around you at the moment. Twitter could fill this gap, instead of being a sort of webification of the long-forgotten .plan file.