Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 6, June 2003
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POLITICALLY SPEAKING:
Council members stripped of credibility in Rick's rezone
By JAMES BUSH
David had a two-to-one lead on Goliath until Heidi Wills walked into the room.
Jaws dropped when Seattle City Council member Wills unexpectedly joined the three members of the Council's Land Use Committee during an April 15 hearing.
A few minutes later, Wills and Committee Chair Judy Nicastro voted to support the petition of Rick's, a Lake City Way topless club, to rezone a piece of single-family zoned land for use as a parking lot.
Committee members Richard Conlin and Margaret Pageler voted against the application, which will be sent on to the full council with a divided report.
Had Wills not shown up, the matter would still have gone forward, but with a "Do Not Pass" recommendation.
So what's the deal? Has young feminist Wills morphed into a strip club booster? And are the club's owners seeking to "systematically pay off our City Council" through campaign contributions, as charged by one neighborhood activist?
No and definitely not, responds Wills. She insists her vote to support the rezone is a tactical effort to improve behavior in the club's sometimes-rowdy parking lot. The owners of Rick's have agreed to a myriad of conditions if the rezone is granted, says Wills, including screening nearby neighbors with a wall and landscaping, and hiring a permanent on-site parking attendant.
Now, on to the money part. According to campaign records, Wills has received a total of $5,150 in donations from persons associated with Rick's and their spouses, including the club's management, project architect David Brown, and attorney Gilbert Levy. She's not alone: Nicastro has received $2,550 and Council member Jim Compton, also up for reelection, got $3,250.
Wills says that she makes tough votes on the behalf of the entire community, not individual campaign donors. "[Contributions] don't have any bearing on how I make public policy decisions I take my responsibilities as a council member seriously," she states.
A Nicastro campaign spokesperson seconds that motion. "Judy's vote is not for sale," says Albertson. "If their aspiration in donating to Judy was to buy her vote, it's not an aspiration that would ever be realized."
Compton's newly-hired campaign manager hasn't even started work yet and declined to comment, but if he had, it's likely these council canaries would be singing as a trio.
For Lake City resident Vic Webbeking, it's just the latest development in the rezone that won't die. This is the third time in the last 15 years that Rick's has tried to legally establish a parking lot on this small parcel behind Webbeking's home.
For the first six years, club goers parked on the lot anyway, a period Webbeking remembers as a blur of car alarms, high-watt stereos, and trash raining down from above. "You'd hear a thump on our garage roof at night, then hear the bottle roll down the roof and break on our driveway," he says.
The City finally shut down the lot in 1994 and the club paid a fine for illegally regrading and paving the site back in 1988. Since then, it's been blocked off with a few bollards and concrete blocks, and trees and shrubbery have gradually obscured Webbeking's view of the club parking lot, if not the din of a seven-day-a-week strip club.
But, while it's understandable that the neighbors aren't happy that Rick's might finally get its way, we should add a few disclaimers. Topless clubs are legal in Seattle. So is making donations to politicians. And a smart business person always tries to get an edge.
Several nearby businesses back the rezone and claim that Rick's has worked hard to be a good neighbor. Even the Bill Pierre auto empire has signed on in support. Bill Pierre Jr. praises the club's financial backing of local events, including the Lake City Chamber of Commerce's annual summer festival, Pioneer Days. "They've supported virtually everything that the [Lake City] chamber has endorsed," he says.
A Rick's spokeswoman told the Seattle Sun that no one from the club was available to offer an official comment on the rezone.
The record doesn't support the cause-and-effect relationship claimed between Wills' vote and campaign contributions. Most of the Rick's-related donations to her campaign came when club owner Frank Colacurcio, manager David Ebert, and Betty Howard, listed as the applicant's representative on rezone documents, attended Wills' campaign kick-off, held two weeks after the committee vote. That same group also attended Compton's kick-off in early May with checkbooks in hand.
At least they brought those checkbooks this time around. Late last year, Nicastro refunded donations made simultaneously by Colacurcio, his wife, and a Texas nightclub operator named Dean Rieber (whose business bears the descriptive title of Double Talent Inc.) because they were made in cash. (City law limits cash donations to $60.) Once the two nightclub owners made it legal by writing checks, Nicastro kept the money.
At any rate, you'd have to convict the politicians involved of extreme political clumsiness. If Wills and Nicastro were really cooking up a compromise to benefit the neighbors, why not actually communicate with them? And if charges of vote-buying are really so upsetting, the three politicos should settle the issue by returning the Rick's donations before the final rezone vote.