This item comes from Seattle Times reporter Kristi Heim.

Port of Seattle Commission candidate David Doud has sent out a flier attacking his opponent, Rob Holland, including a photo of Holland speaking behind an ACORN banner.

"Elect David Doud for a Clean Honest and Open Port," the mailer states. Doud, a real estate developer, is vying for the post against Holland, a biofuels salesman.

Doud's flier says Holland "embraces ACORN, whose illegal activities are well known..." attributing the statement to "Laura Turner, Seattle Times online."

The photo actually comes from a Port candidate forum organized by ACORN in August in the Boulevard Park neighborhood of Seattle. Four Port commission candidates attended, as well as State Rep. Ross Hunter, then a candidate for King County executive who later endorsed Doud. The candidates discussed the neighborhood's airport noise concerns and made stump speeches.

The quotation is a comment posted by a reader on Seattletimes.com, not by anyone at The Seattle Times or its Web site. The reader gave her name as Laura Turner and did not claim any affiliation with the newspaper.

Holland took issue with Doud's flier Monday. All of the Port candidates were invited, and Holland, John Creighton, Max Vekich and Al Yuen attended. Tom Albro sent a campaign staff person.

"When you're running for a nonpartisan office, you'll go anywhere," Holland said. "I just showed up and the ACORN banner was there and they took a picture of me and they sent it to the Republicans here locally. It's a narrative that works because Republicans are hitting at ACORN."

The national community activist group ACORN, formed to encourage homeownership and voting among low-income citizens, has been accused of financial mismanagement and fraud, losing millions in federal funding recently after an undercover video showed its employees giving advice to a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute.

Doud said Monday that he doesn't think his flier is inaccurate.

"I think the significance of the photo is not so much of him behind the banner but about the comments he made there about shared prosperity and the unionization of trucks," Doud said. "I think that information is relevant for voters."

The Doud flier also said Holland has a "history of mismanaging public money," and reprinted part of a court document directing Holland earlier this year to return money owed from an overpayment of unemployment benefits.

According to documents filed in King County Superior Court, the court ordered Holland in January to pay back $663, which it determined he was overpaid in June 2008. The warrant, filed by the state Employment Security Department, was satisfied in February.

"The issue is resolved," Holland said. "A lot of people go through unemployment issues -- sometimes you get an overpayment or sometimes you're not sure of the lapse or the time unemployed. When there was an opportunity to see there was an overpayment, I paid it."

Holland also was upset that Doud's flier printed the address of the home Holland shares with his partner.

"That's absolutely inappropriate," he said.