Ballardite Brian Wynne knows how fragile a community can be. Having been at law school in Tulane University in New Orleans last year when Hurricane Katrina touched land, he's seen first hand a community dissolve.

"That whole thing with Katrina - it can show you how fleeting things can be," Wynne said last weekend, recounting the experience in a coffee shop on Market Street. The Port Orchard native is looking for volunteers for the Municipal League's Candidate Evaluation Committee (CEC).

The Municipal League of King County is a nearly century-old organization involved in a number of civic activities and their candidate evaluations committee, where Wynne is a steering committee member, rates candidates for King County elections based on professional qualification rather than political orientation.

Wynne said the evaluations are a lot of work, especially in a reasonably sunny Seattle August. After training and orientation, CEC volunteers spend time doing background research on candidates and prepare questions for interviews held for two weeks at the end of the month. Candidates interviewed are rated on a number of leadership criteria including involvement, effectiveness, character and knowledge.

Wynne said one of the biggest payoffs for the effort is working with other people who feel the same way about the community.

"We have doctors and lawyers and accounts and professionals [volunteering with the Municipal League] but we also have the guy who works at Kinko's on Broadway who writes a community news blog."

Wynne's own introduction to volunteering was hearing a story about the CEC on a radio talk show. His curiosity about the nuts and bolts of government got the best of him.

"It's the mechanisms of how things happen and how the business gets done," he said.

But an interest in getting away from Seattle's peculiar brand of community isolation was another reason to join:

"I hated how Seattle could be this cold place where everybody just goes into their houses," he said.

Wynne volunteered for two years on the CEC before moving to New Orleans into a house on the Tulane campus. The weekend the hurricane struck, his girlfriend was visiting and on that Saturday night they drove out of town in response to a hurricane evacuation warning, a not-unheard-of event in New Orleans. They made it to Little Rock Arkansas early Sunday morning, but Wynne remembers the procession out of town, the empty ATMs, the endless lines at gas stations, and all of the highway lanes northbound, eerily, even though it was two days before the hurricane would arrive, and longer still before the enormity of the damaged would be realized.

Though his house was spared flood damage, the wreckage in nearby neighborhoods was complete. Even when his bags were packed at the end of December, a few blocks away, whole neighborhoods were still without power.

Wynne returned to Seattle to attend law school at Seattle University, and he also reconnected with the Municipal League because understanding candidates and informing voters is a way to create a stronger sense of community, which probably means a lot to someone who knows how easily they can be torn down.

"It's a way to build something," he said.