Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 12, December 2003

Copyright 2003 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

POLITICALLY SPEAKING:

Activists singing 'Sue me, sue you blues'

By JAMES BUSH

After waiting four-and-a-half years to finally see a majority of the Seattle City Council take her side in the battle over Northgate neighborhood redevelopment, Jan Brucker is in a mood to celebrate.

But, there's one thing she wants to add.

A North End activist and attorney, Brucker, who lives in the Licton Springs neighborhood, was responsible for many of the legal challenges at various points in the process, and she isn't pleased to hear council members at their Nov. 12 press conference talking about lawsuits like they're a bad thing.

"Litigation," says Brucker, "is just another way of carrying on the necessary conversation in our democratic society."

Switch the setting: Now we're at the Nov. 6 meeting of the Northeast District Council, listening as King County Monorail backer Ron Sprenkle describes his group's ongoing struggles with King County elections regulators. Matthew Fox, University District activist and former campaign manager for last fall's successful City Initiative 75, laughs cheerfully at Sprenkle's tales of attempted conflict resolution. Accept this fact right now, Fox advises him, before the campaign is over, you're going to have to sue King County Elections.

Now another switch: We're talking with Kelly Meinig, one of the more vocal opponents of the attempted rezone at the Rick's strip club on Lake City Way. The Lake City neighborhood activist's discussing the prospect of taking the city to court over the Nov. 5 approval of the rezone. The strip club's application won out by a 5-4 tally, three of those "yes" votes coming from council members who accepted thousands of dollars in donations from persons connected with Rick's.

Meinig and other activists make a good case that the City violated the Appearance of Fairness Doctrine by letting the Lake City Way Three (scandal-plagued City Council members Jim Compton, Judy Nicastro, and Heidi Wills) cast votes on the issue.

Meinig says she'd prefer to see Council President Peter Steinbrueck intervene (and has written Steinbrueck a letter to that effect), but she doesn't expect that he will do so. "They are making it the community's responsibility to sue in order to preserve the integrity of the process," she says, "and that's a lousy thing to do."

It's especially lousy because pursuing that lawsuit would mean spending about $30,000 on legal fees. Perhaps, Meinig continues hopefully, there's a citizen out there with a big bank account and a similarly-sized sense of outrage willing to provide the necessary funding for a trip to court.

A quick question: what do these three conversations have in common? They all took place within a two-week period.

Yes, lawsuits and neighborhood activism now go hand in hand. Brucker is right. Suing the government is no longer considered shameful behavior, it's just a part of the process.

Activists aren't the only ones doing the suing. When Rick's filed a lawsuit against the city over the reconsideration of the rezone (the council originally approved the measure in June, then rescinded the decision following revelations of illegal lobbying by strip club representatives), it included as defendants 11 activists who had participated in the process. While the club's attorney claims he was only trying to avoid an early dismissal for failing to include necessary parties under the state's exacting land use appeal laws, his suit cast a pretty wide net. A couple of the folks included merely submitted comment letters about the original application; one unfortunate club neighbor was named for the simple act of returning a comment form the City included with his written notification of the nearby rezone.

The City writes you and invites you to comment on a rezone application, you comment, and you get sued.

It's heartening to see the neighbors standing up to the strip club weasels. In the Rick's case, the extra defendants joined together, hired a lawyer and had themselves removed from the suit (at a cost of several hundred dollars). Once freed of that legal threat, four of the 11 then hired their own lawyer and filed a request that Compton, Nicastro and Wills recuse themselves from the final rezone vote.

It's this sort of toughness (and litigiousness) that has become the rule when seeking ways to convince governmental entities to do their duty. Meinig has an excellent point: perhaps the next big activist cause in this City should be a legal defense fund.

Unfortunately, some may complain that this column's tribute to legal gunplay doesn't fit in with all the preaching about civility that seems to be the in thing in political circles. You want civility? Hire nice lawyers.