Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 1, January 2003

Copyright 2002 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article and photos below in your research. Be sure to quote the Seattle Sun as your source.

POLITICALLY SPEAKING:

Nickels administration helps UW, but own image takes a hit

By JAMES BUSH

When Greg Nickels ran for mayor in 2001 on a promise to do things "the Seattle Way," his campaign invoked the neighborly image of the Seattleite in the rain, waiting patiently for the "walk" sign before crossing the empty street.

But Nickels' "Seattle Way" has taken a decidedly less neighborly turn as representatives of Seattle's Northeast neighborhoods found out at the Dec. 3 meeting of the City Council's Land Use Committee.

In the face of a forceful, although largely behind-the-scenes lobbying effort from the Nickels administration, the business community, and the Seattle Times editorial page, several neighborhood protections were deleted from the proposed University of Washington Master Plan. If this had been a fistfight, North End activists would be sporting two black eyes.

"We got pretty well clobbered," is how Matt Fox puts it. The U-District Community Council president and his Laurelhurst Community Council counterpart Jeanne Hale delivered their gloomy post-mortem two days later at a community meeting. "The neighborhoods basically lost everything that we've been working for," Hale says.

In a series of votes, the Seattle City Council removed all restrictions on UW property acquisition outside the campus area, while allowing the university to exclude UW Medical Center patients and all visitor trips from its required traffic counts. City Council members also extended the term of the plan from a flat 10 years to however long it takes the university to add its proposed 3 million additional square feet of built space.

By necessity, the pro-UW effort was largely a stealth campaign. Under City law, institutional master plans must be evaluated by the City Council on a quasi-judicial basis. This means that only information on the formal record is considered, and Council members must turn away phone calls, letters, and other communications. Think of it as a "no lobbying" rule and a strict one.

The Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce got around the rule by simply ignoring it. Several City Council members who attended the chamber's Leadership Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, ended up on the receiving end of a diatribe by business leaders, who accused them of failing to properly appreciate UW's economic value to the region.

The maneuvering within City Hall was more elaborate. According to a series of internal City memos obtained by Fox through a public records request, the administration's designated stealth lobbyist was Office of Policy and Management (OPM) staffer Bob Scales. Much to the annoyance of the Nickels crew, Scales' attempt to set up individual "informational" meetings with City Council members was rebuffed by the in-house watchdogs for this process.

Good call. A Sept. 13 memo from Scales and Director Mary Jean Ryan confirms that although OPM is technically empowered to provide information to both mayor and City Council, the office takes its marching orders from Nickels. This statement from the Ryan/Scales memo doesn't invoke the image of unbiased information providers: "How can we best use the next 45 days to educate the council on the illegality and negative impacts of their proposed amendments?" Later in the memo, its authors discuss tactics for "how to rally community support for using the UW as an engine for economic development."

Another Nickels tactic could cause him bigger problems down the road. Officials of the City's Department of Design, Construction, and Land Use (DCLU) were key participants in the internal effort to support the UW's positions. Turning the City's construction regulators into UW advocates could strike a long-term blow to DCLU's credibility in the community.

And would any Seattle establishment exercise be complete without a contribution from the Times editorial page? In late September, editorial page editor Jim Vesely engaged in a little neighborhood-bashing labeling UW's critics as "perennial activists" and calling their arguments against unregulated university expansion "both arrogant and ignorant."

But the UW boosters are ignoring recent history. When the last master plan was approved 10 years ago, the university was granted virtually unlimited growth within campus boundaries in exchange for strict limits on the university's ability to expand into surrounding neighborhoods.

The UW's goal this time around was to keep everything it already has, while stripping any and all protections from surrounding neighborhoods.

Next up will be the university's formal request for the lifting of limitations on the amount of office space the UW can rent in surrounding neighborhoods. If the City Council's Dec. 3 cave-in is any indication, the lease lid is as good as gone.

At first glance, you could chalk up the UW Master Plan process as another win for Mayor Nickels. By convincing the City Council to delete neighborhood protections a majority of members had previously backed, this is just another sign that the mayor not the council runs the show in City Hall.

But the Nickels record now includes strong anti-community stands and a record of seeking to subvert the City process. Is this really the "Seattle Way?"