To put on Expo ’74, the Cowleses, banks, and businesses gambled large amounts of cash while politicians from both parties pulled all their strings. City government became a virtual adjunct to a private enterprise, a World’s Exposition.
By William Stimson
Spokane, a city established to take advantage of the beauty of its river, continued to flush sewage into that river until 1958, long after most cities in the state had built waste treatment facilities.
The Spokesman-Review gave up its fight against a treatment plant in the early 1940s and started editorializing in favor of it. A citizens committee and state health authorities also put pressure on the city commissioners to get the plant built. Yet bureaucratic wrangling and inertia delayed it for another dozen years.
The polluted river was only one symptom of a general malaise. Spokane also needed, for example, a new economic strategy, a new city hall, a new public safety building, a new airport. Business leaders were interested in revamping Spokane’s downtown, which was suffering from decades of neglect and from the sudden rise of retail competition at Northtown and other new suburban stores.
The business establishment that had run Spokane for a half century saw clearly that the commissioner form of government was obsolete. It put together a committee, conducted a brief campaign, and on March 8, 1960, voters adopted the city manager system by a large margin.
At the same time, downtown business leaders raised money among themselves to pay for a consultant’s plan for downtown Spokane. The so-called Ebasco Plan called for a grand reworking of downtown, from removing the railroads and opening up the river, to overhead skywalks linking buildings. With the help of federal urban renewal funds, a new “government center” would replace city hall, the police station, and other government offices in one swoop.
The business leaders had put this plan together before they bothered to involve citizens. All citizens had to do was approve $10 million in public bonds to finance it. The bonds, which required a 60 percent vote, got only 40 percent. Stunned, business leaders regrouped and hired public relations help. The Spokesman-Review launched a campaign of articles and editorials praising the project. In December 1963 voters turned it down a second time by the same margin.
These two votes were the origin of the idea that part of Spokane’s problem was that it was populated by naysayers. With Spokane in such poor
condition, why would citizens reject a plan to cure it?
No one had ever suggested that the health of Spokane’s downtown was any business of, not to mention the responsibility of, the general citizenry. It had always been understood to be a conglomeration of private holdings, and profitable holdings at that. When these downtown property owners suddenly proposed that citizens invest $10 million in a downtown that profited a few private parties, voters were understandably suspicious.
Yet downtown leaders had a case to make. The economics and role of cities were changing all over the country. That was why federal urban renewal programs were suddenly available to supplement such efforts.
Spokane’s real political problem was not a recalcitrant population of naysayers, but that the city had no mechanism to build a constituency for its many needed urban improvements. The election of 1910 had abolished the neighborhood politicians who might have fanned out to tell voters, “I know what you mean about those guys downtown, but in this case they’re telling the truth.” Fifty years of commissioner government had made city hall representatives into remote technocrats. A newspaper might have served as a neutral observer in educating the public. But the Spokesman-Review and the Chronicle both belonged to the biggest owner of downtown property, and everyone knew it.
One of the few leaders to grasp Spokane’s political problem was one who looked at it with the fresh eye of an outsider. King Cole was a California urban planner recruited by downtown property owners to find a way to revamp downtown.
Cole took one look at the situation in Spokane and announced to his new employers that in order to improve downtown what they really needed was better connections to their community. “We’re marching all by ourselves,” he told them. “There’s nobody behind us.”
Cole began his efforts to revive the downtown by asking every citizen organization in town to send representatives to start a kind of citywide citizen council. The new Associations for a Better Community (ABC) had members from organizations ranging from garden clubs to the Athletic Round Table and the Teamster’s Union. ABC accomplished some city tasks, for example financing the Japanese Gardens in Manito Park.
The Associations for a Better Community effort was soon abandoned as the urgencies of Expo claimed the attention of Cole and other downtown leaders. But its brief existence gave a hint of what might have been. One of those who showed up for the ABC meetings was Jim Chase, owner of an auto body repair shop on the city’s north side, who attended the meetings representing the NAACP. It was the first time Chase had been invited to participate in local government. He remained interested in politics and was elected to the city council in 1975. In 1981 he became the city’s first African-American mayor, a man known for his friendliness and common touch.
However, Chase was elected mayor under a government where local political leaders had little power. Had the ABC movement bloomed into a genuine citizen-oriented approach to government, there might have been lots of Jim Chases to welcome disaffected citizens in mapping Spokane’s future.
But that would have required Spokane to adopt an entirely new approach to government. Despite the new city manager system of 1960, the route Spokane’s traditional leaders actually chose was a slight modification of the closed-door policy under which the city had operated for a half century: a small group of influential people decide among themselves what ought to be done, and then set out to sell it to the public with a public relations campaign.
This approach selling Expo to voters was criticized in William Youngs’ book about Expo, The Fair and the Falls. Young described a Spokesman-Review interview with Robert Jacobson, director of the proposed Ebasco Plan renewal project. The reporter asked Jacobson, “Could urban renewal be used as a tool to get money into the pockets of private enterprise?” Jacobson answered “No,” because the grant money would go to the city. The reporter asked, “What is the relationship between Spokane Unlimited, Inc., and urban renewal?” Jacobson said, “None,” adding that, while it was true that Spokane Unlimited, the downtown business organization, had paid for the Ebasco report, “Neither Spokane Unlimited nor Ebasco has authority to undertake urban renewal.”
These answers were narrowly true, Youngs commented, but remarkable for their lack of candor. Of course private enterprise would benefit from a renaissance downtown. The Ebasco report estimated that downtown properties would gain about $11 million in value. The relationship between Spokane Unlimited and urban renewal was direct and decisive: without the business leaders involved in Spokane Unlimited there would have been no urban renewal proposal.
Since many citizens knew or suspected the truth, such simplistic and misleading answers were likely to deepen cynicism.
That did not mean, however, that Spokane’s leadership did not also have a point. The problems of 1962 were immediate and pressing.
Arriving from California, King Cole took one look at the situation in Spokane and announced to his new employers that in order to improve downtown what they really needed was better connections to their community. “We’re marching all by ourselves,” he told them. “There’s nobody behind us.”
One item on the city’s to-do list was renovation and expansion of Spokane’s airport. The city was entering the era of the jet airliner with an airport that was a relic of World War II. Consequently, the city council had asked voters to approve bonds for improving it in the 1950s. Voters turned it down. Now in 1962, the council again proposed a bond issue, and voters said no again.
Despite the new government, leaders learned to work around voters instead of with them.
At that point-a turning point in Spokane politics-Mayor Neal Fosseen got together with the county commissioners and struck a bargain that accomplished what voters had rejected-a renovated airport. The city sidestepped the voters’ verdict by selling councilmanic bonds, which did not require voter approval, and making “in kind” contributions to the project. The county supplied more money, and federal grants made up the rest.
It was a creative solution that worked. It became the prototype of how city government would cope with the voters’ tendency to turn down bond issues. Leaders learned to work around voters instead of with them. They did this through cooperation between the business elite and government officials.
That approach produced Spokane’s proudest moment of the 20th century. To put on Expo ’74, the Cowleses, banks, and businesses gambled large amounts of cash. Local Democratic power Rod Lindsay called upon his friends, U.S. Senators Jackson and Magnuson and Congressman Foley. Republican businessman Luke Williams went to Olympia to secure its cooperation. City government, meanwhile, became a virtual adjunct to a private enterprise, a World’s Exposition. Private money in turn produced a public park of incomparable value.
The public cooperated more than is popularly perceived. Many recall that citizens turned down the Expo bond issue. That was only because the bonds required a super-majority of 60 percent. Fifty-six percent of Spokanites voted for the bonds, which would have been a landslide in other elections.
Nonetheless, Expo was clearly the accomplishment of insider politics. The plan was laid out in carefully guarded board rooms and later presented to the public. Personal relationships and trust were decisive factors. Cooperation was essential; one person holding back might scuttle the whole thing. Don’t depend upon public support; that was unlikely until after the thing was done.
Expo showed that insider politics worked. In just 15 years, Spokane had come from a regional joke-”Spokaloo”-to an All-American city.
Yet insider politics had clearly cost Spokane something, and it came to be called “naysayer-attitude.” Each time city officials circumvented a public vote, it increased the impression that the will of citizens could be flouted. After Mayor Fosseen concluded the deal to get the airport renovated, a citizen appeared before the city council to say the city appeared to have the legal right to make that deal, but, “I wonder if you are within your moral rights?” The bitter 1980s campaign to build a solid waste incinerator without a public vote accomplished the goal, but at an enormous price in public sentiment. A study conducted by Washington State University political scientist Nicholas Lovrich found that Spokane has a larger portion of “cynical” citizens than most bigger cities, including Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis.
A second problem with insider politics is that it opens officials to the danger of a group-think that rejects any but the official information. Once an agreement is struck in private, many feel obligated to resist outside information that might change the conclusion.
A third problem with insider politics is that it must have complete cooperation of certain parties or it falls apart. The need to enforce this cooperation can lead to pettiness in relationships, shunning, and a spiteful brand of politics. Insiders have a hard time shrugging and saying, “It’s just politics” when someone dissents because, in insider politics, dissent tends to wreck everything by pushing the issue into the public arena.
Finally, over the long run, insider politics invites the general citizenry to suspect the worst about its leaders. Not knowing exactly who makes decisions or why, citizens are apt to assume they are not in the public interest. When the secret Pan-Tans were exposed in 1909 (see Part 3: “The Election that Changed Spokane’s History”), the members tried to argue that they were meeting in secret to further the fortunes of the entire city. It may have been true; there is no evidence to the contrary. But it was impossible to win such an argument; secrecy itself is suspicious.
So it was, too, with Spokane’s insider politicians at the end of the 20th century. They were likely to be regarded with suspicion by a public that did not know them very well. The best example of this is William Cowles, 3rd, one of Spokane’s most important yet least known leaders.
