“Insiders & Naysayers”: A Search for the Headwaters of Spokane’s Tempestuous 21st Century Politics.
By William Stimson, August 2009
Ten years ago Spokane was in the grips of a civic controversy the likes of which it had never seen before. The immediate cause was the city council’s decision to revive the downtown area by putting money into the construction of the River Park Square mall. The council would help the project by agreeing to purchase, from the developers, a revamped and expanded parking garage that would be owned by the city but serve the new mall. The city also agreed to help the developers get a $22.6 million federal loan. This was risky for the city since the collateral for this loan was the federal aid the federal government gave to Spokane for use in its poorer neighborhoods. The city assured citizens that expert studies proved the income of the garage would pay off costs so the garage would ultimately cost taxpayers nothing. The city also assured citizens that the risk of the $22.65 million loan was negligible, a mere formality.
A substantial portion of Spokane’s citizens did not accept these reassurances and angrily accused the council of using city money in an insider deal that would benefit the city’s most prominent family, the Cowles family, publishers of the city’s daily newspaper. The editorial page of the Spokesman-Review in return accused these “naysayers” of standing in the way of progress. Tempers ran so high that at one point the mayor of 
Spokane ordered police officers to be present during city council meetings.
In 1997, one of the mall’s severest critics, John Talbott, won the mayor’s office from the mall’s chief supporter, Jack Geraghty. Two years later the mall’s critics won a majority on the city council. When the garage failed to cover its debt payments, this new council refused to follow through with the promised city “loans” to avoid the impending financial collapse of the public-private partnership.
This launched Spokane’s era of government-by-court order, which lasted about five years. The mall developers asked the courts to order the city to stand by its financial commitments. Independent journalists sued city government to open secret records. The city sued its own consultant and Cowles development companies and even alleged a “civil conspiracy” involving unnamed city officials to divert public funds for private use. Investors who’d purchased bonds to finance the garage sued both the city and Cowles companies alleging fraud. At one point the manager of the mall sued his own employers, the Cowleses, and a city council member, Steve Eugster, sued the city he represented.
These suits ended up costing all the various parties tens of millions of dollars of wasted money, but they at least got the facts on the table. It turned out critics of the project had been right: the figures and charts that were supposed to prove citizens would not contribute to the cost of the private mall were basically made up. (The city is still paying off the cost of the garage and will be for years to come.) On the other hand, the general appearance and business climate of downtown Spokane took a sharp turn for the better precisely when River Park Square opened, vindicating Mayor Geraghty and other city council members who maintained the mall would revive the city.
The basic question of whether Spokane is the kind of city where its leading family takes advantage of taxpayers, or the kind of city that is dominated by “naysayer” citizens, was not resolved. There are many still on each side.
My own theory is that neither is the case, but that the episode exposed a fundamental flaw in Spokane’s civic infrastructure. Many cities had controversies over the kind of “public-private partnership” that split Spokane. The difference with Spokane was how deep and wide the damage went. Every city has house fires, but if the whole city burns down you may be sure you’ve got a deeper problem than figuring out who was careless with matches.
Spokane’s politics had evolved in such a way that there was practically no working relationship between leadership, largely the business community, and a large portion of its citizens. This was well hidden for decades by the fact that the business community was relatively self-sufficient and did not have to ask for much help from voters. Taxpayers were quite content not to be asked. “Low taxes” was a political principle both sides agreed to.
When River Park Square came up for decision, city leaders dared not simply ask voters to support it. That would have violated Spokane’s no-taxes social contract. The city council actually took pains to ensure that there would not be a public vote on the matter. Nevertheless, citizens (or, more accurately, slightly more than half of the citizenry, judging from vote counts of the era) became suspicious and rebelled.
One of the acts of this rebellion by voters was to change the city’s form of government from a business-friendly city manager system to one in which council members are elected by residential districts. This has had its intended effect of counterbalancing the influence of downtown business. It’s doubtful the newly constituted council would conspire to slip a downtown improvement plan past voters.
But that might suggest a new order of problems. A city is ultimately an economic entity. Spokane’s leadership has always come from the ranks of businesses that considered the city’s general direction its special obligation. It’s not clear whether leaders coming from local neighborhoods will be able to see the city as whole and fill the gap. They haven’t been tested because Spokane is still riding the momentum of River Park Square.
Until the River Park Square debacle, Spokane politics had evolved in such a way that there was practically no working relationship between leadership, largely the business community, and a large portion of its citizens.
An even more important change in Spokane’s local government is the demise of the daily newspaper. Technology has altered communications so rapidly that it is already hard to believe there was a time when virtually all of the community’s civic information — news, entertainment, political exchanges, commerce — had to flow through a single clearinghouse on Riverside Avenue. The image the city had of itself depended heavily on the newspapers’ photographers, feature writers, reporters and editorials writers. Every meeting of any significance had a representative of a Cowles newspaper in attendance, so that the impression most people had of civic affairs was what a Spokesman-Review or Chronicle reporter explained.
This near monopoly on public messages was not the result of a publisher’s unbridled ambition. Rather it is another example of how technology – in this case the marvelous Linotypes and roll-fed rotary presses of the big city daily – empowers some at the expense of others. There was a lot of truth to the old quip that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press to those who own one. Because of this technological advantage, most American cities had a “powerful publisher” to vilify.
The disappearance of the traditional newspaper leaves a large question mark over Spokane’s civic health. For a century the Spokesman-Review has supplied information, recommended an agenda, and inspected local government. Whatever its misdeeds over the last century (and a few will be mentioned in these pages), it performed many important services for Spokane. It’s not clear what system will fulfill those tasks in the future.
It is possible nothing will. Those who blamed the Cowleses for everything wrong in Spokane anticipate a post-Spokesman-Review era in which a monopolistic communications is replaced by one that is infinitely diverse, and presumably one that they agree with more than they did with the Cowleses. But how will a community come to agreement on the truth when everyone is listening only to their own favorite versions of the truth? The “dominant newspaper” communication model that reigned in the twentieth century may be replaced by a model pioneered by talk radio.
But that is a problem for the twenty-first century. The articles that follow, written ten years ago in middle of the River Park Square controversy, were an attempt to discover the origins of the political problems that bothered Spokane in the twentieth century.
William Stimson is Director of the Journalism Program at Eastern Washington University and the author of Spokane, An Illustrated History, American Historical Press, 1999.