Mielke just can't wait to be king

Knowing that his fellow Commissioners Steve Stuart and Marc Boldt would be out of the way this week, as they are both attending the Washington Association of Counties’ annual conference in Bellevue, Commissioner Tom Mielke joked last week that he gets two votes this week.

I mentioned that to my podmate Andrea Damewood just now, and she broke into “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” from “The Lion King.”

Watch the video here – the real video, not Andrea singing

Just picture Mielke skipping through the halls of the Clark County Public Service Center, singing snippets from this 1994 Disney hit:

I’m gonna be the mane event/Like no king was before/I’m brushing up on looking down/I’m working on my roar

So what could Mielke, so often the odd man out, accomplish if he had that precious second vote? He could make the public bear the cost of business development, impose a tax on newspapers and replace C-Tran’s fleet of buses with VW buses so that they will always run full.

OK, so that last example, unlike the other two, is not something that Mielke has actually endorsed. But he didn’t support Proposition 1, he doesn’t support the Columbia River Crossing and he doesn’t support an admissions tax to help build a stadium at Clark College.

Maybe he’s just spending his time in his office, sending one-word responses to emails.